Painting with Light

The Trees Are Very Happy

The evening before Thanksgiving found me with family, walking around the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in the dark. There was a light show. It was called Lightscape. And I think it was the best light show I have ever seen.

I don't say this lightly. I've enjoyed the light shows at Longwood gardens. They are utterly charming and use a classical French garden very sensitively. And then one year they added a walk through the woods, which I thought took the whole experience to a new level. Call it a walk on the wild side.

But that's where Brooklyn starts. It's an artist-driven show. There is a synoptic power bringing the individual efforts together, and also sequencing an experience that starts with happy discovery and moves to - shall we say happy shock - and then through some quieter and subtly seducing sections, all leading you finally to the exit and the real world. Which, after what you've just been through, is also something of a shock.

I think it's fair to say that the invention of electricity changed the way we all see light. Before that we had sunlight (particularly on a sunny day) and we had night, which could be dark in ways that many now living have never experienced. Imagine a moonless, overcast night with absolutely no electric lights - not even the flashlight on your iPhone. Against that black velvet background, there were torchlight parades, and eventually whale-oil lanterns, and then gaslight. But the switch to electricity took things to a new level.

And very quickly electricity transformed entertainment. The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago extended its hours deep into the evening by bathing the exposition grounds in electric light, in the process consuming three times as much electricity as all the rest of Chicago. (For more, see City of Lights.)

Coney Island was quick to pick up the gauntlet, bathing its already fanciful structures in artificial light and drawing admirers (and detractors) from quite literally around the world. (For more, see Night Lights at Coney Island.)

And then of course we had the lights of Times Square, where neon showed what it could do in the service of Mammon. I haven't smoked a Camel cigarette in more than half a century, but I am still drawn to the garish charm of Times Square.

What happened to me in Brooklyn, though, was something deeper and more meaningful. I was dealing directly with actual artists, who in turn were telling me things that could not be put into words. 

To quote Arnold Schwarzenegger, I'll be back.

For a story in the New Yorker from 2023, click here.

See also City of Lights, Night Lights at Coney Island, Lighting Rittenhouse.