It’s approximately six in the morning. Craning my neck, my face catches an air-conditioned sigh from the vents; the sky beyond the dust-smudged window is a mellow gray fading into inchoate shades of blue. The world, at approximately six in the morning in Utah, is still.

My head knocks gently against the window, the sweeping view of the desert landscape stretching endlessly outwards. The scruffy plants anchored at the side of the highway smear into the red of the sand, their bristling limbs shuddering as the minivan hastens onwards.

My eyes track sparse patches of vegetation as the radio whispers in the background. The gentle susurration of words wafts over slumbering bodies, the speakers’ soft-spoken verses swallowed in languid inhales and drawn into unsuspecting dreams. The car grumbles onwards. The Graveyard Book filters through the car speakers. Listless, I shift to the side, peering past the front seats and through the windshield.

The sun is rising.

At a distance, a golden yolk breaks across the horizon. The long shadows of sparse shrubs are instantly awash with burnished red. Rays of effulgent saffron leak onto the sand, spilling over the skyline, snakes of slithering sun writhing across my vision. The burgeoning sunlight spears that feeble, waking sky with a shaft of lustrous copper and saturates the earth with warmth. Orange floods the highway, the pavement gleaming liquid gold beneath travel-worn tires, radiance bathing the interior of the car with tangerine. From inside, sunlight washes over me, lurid and overwhelming. The color blinds me for a moment—as if I had never seen a sunrise before, as if I had lived a life sheltered in brittle darkness up until this point.

Two days and one night…Two days consuming musty stale travel and the occasional bag of chips. In a white minivan smeared in rufous dust, I hurtle towards the sun, my heart rabbiting wildly in my chest, my fingers tingling, feeling light. In Utah, a car rumbles along a barren highway and I look towards dawn.

The Graveyard Book ends.

Reflection:

I had actually planned to respond to a different piece of art, though I suppose that may be evident by the less-than-ideal camera angle. Nonetheless, I was, in the end, drawn to this work in particular. For one, I found the use of color to be bright and invigorating, almost neon in its appearance. My first thought in that regard would then correspond to the use of “lurid” in my ekphrastic response. The medium interested me, as well because as opposed to painting on a canvas or other traditional alternatives (paper, cardboard, and the like), the artist instead chose to display this piece of art on a table. The legs are decorated with cheerful shades of blue and red, augmenting rather than diminishing the intricate face of the tabletop.

On the day of our field trip to the Dorsky Museum, I wandered aimlessly around the exhibits, searching for something to spark inspiration. After three rotations along the same trodden paths lined with portraits and multi-media abstracts, I found a piece of art by Jan Sawka that I could consider being suitable. Having obtained what I was there for, I turned to leave the exhibit, swiftly passing the aforementioned table and abruptly halting my exit. A brief moment of hesitation occurred—I already had the piece I wanted to write about after all—before I impulsively decided to take a quick snapshot of the intriguing item,  just in case. Of course, I do know myself best, in the end: when given the choice between abstract and landscape, I will always choose landscape.

My immediate reaction to this piece was less of an emotion and more of a memory. About two years ago, my high school extended our spring break to ten days. On a whim, my family decided to spend those ten days on a road trip to Moab, Utah. The result was thirty-six hours in a cramped, cruddy minivan: four people, three bikes in the back, and mountains of luggage piled in the footwells and stacked strategically in the trunk. We stopped only for gas, snacks, and bathroom breaks—and once because our van gave out somewhere in Kansas. I perpetually sat in the back seat since I could not drive. All I could do was sleep, so sometimes I would wake up at some point in the day or night and my surroundings would be entirely transformed. Our dingy minivan braved snowstorms in mountain passes in the wee hours of the morning, great winds in Tornado Alley, mountain goat sightings, and frequent family fights. Despite all of the above, I have to say that I experienced some of life’s most beautiful moments in that crowded car. My response to this piece of art reflects the good found in bad things.

In the work, there are at least seven whole renditions of the sun, caught in various phases in time. As the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, this piece depicts its path through the sky as it completes a single day. But the image in the painting could also refer to a state of ambiguity and timelessness in that there appears to be no definite time of day that this painting is set in. The painting could also be interpreted as a statement on nature—how any changes experienced by Mother Nature are gradual and take profound amounts of time compared to the paltry lifespans of human beings and our mechanical empires. Or perhaps the vibrant orange-pink shades in the foreground are not water at all, like I had initially assumed. On that logic then, maybe this landscape depicts a more dismal future in which lava creates fissures in the land of our Earth, the layer of ochre above the green horizon a reflection of fire and heat. I personally chose to see this painting as very contradictory. I view sunrises and sunsets as some of Earth’s most awe-inspiring ephemeral wonders. And so, to have immortalized both a sunrise, a sunset, and everything in between in a painting, I feel like there is a contrast in there, somewhere. At first, I did not know the name of the artist or the artwork, but I am happy that I found it. [The artist is also Jan Sawka.]