THE FOUNTAINS
AGNES PELTON, 1926
So where's the light coming from in this one? The big sun in the back? The glowing ball at the bottom? That white thing climbing the middle? Everything's just lit, all of it, off everything else, the whole thing rising slow, humming. File it under wind chimes. Guru things, crystals. Then stand here a minute, and apologize. Now, the story. This was painted inside a windmill. Seriously, a real one, out on Long Island. Agnes Pelton lived in it, alone, paying her rent by painting portraits of the rich summer crowd. Nice dresses, checks clearing. Then in 1926, in her mid-forties, she starts making these. Not what's out the window. What she sees with her eyes closed. This is one of the first ones she ever did. Meanwhile in Paris, everybody's breaking guitars into little cubes. And she's in a windmill, painting light. And the quiet runs in the family. Her grandmother was Elizabeth Tilton. Her affair with Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous preacher in America, was the biggest scandal of the eighteen-hundreds. Six months in court, every paper in the country, and he walks. The family's wrecked. Agnes's mother more or less goes into hiding, runs a little music school in Brooklyn, raises her daughter in a house where nobody talks loud. So look what that turned into. The loudest noise in America happens to this family, and the kid grows up making the quietest pictures in the building. No faces. No story. Just light, minding its own business. She painted like this for thirty-five more years. Alone mostly, unsold mostly, completely unbothered. So yeah, you can stop looking for the light source. It was never in the picture.