Artist Speaks The Secret Language Of Water

The paths of light streak across the darkness, like the afterglow of the sun across your retina after you close your eyes on a summer day. Or perhaps like the smoky path in the air left behind by a kid waving a sparkler on the Fourth of July, or a flashlight. It’s actually the sun dancing across water, but for artist Phyllis Crowley, it’s not the source of the light that matters. It’s the shapes the light leaves behind, a record of the way it moved — and the way it suggests a meaning, just out of reach.

The pieces are part of ​“Lexicon,” a show of Crowley’s long-exposure photographs of light on water, on display now at City Gallery on Upper State Street through March 26. Crowley called the show that because she saw her images, in the end, as a means of communicating, with the past and the future.

“Long ago I saw a photo by Harry Callahan of sunlight reflecting off a pond. He had slowed the shutter down so that the reflected light turned into various wriggles and tiny circles. I was fascinated by the mysterious writing on the water and tried unsuccessfully to imitate it,” Crowley writes in an accompanying statement. ​“Two years ago I decided to try again.… I have always had a fascination with water and reflections, and it has figured in much of my artwork. The Lexicon Series was made by standing in various ponds in Cape Cod, like the above, and slowing the camera shutter way down to capture the silent voice of sunlight writing messages on the water.”

“Visual language can consist of many different elements: letters, characters, pictographs, glyphs, drawings,” she continues. ​“The human mind, always searching for meaning and messages, combines these forms into symbols, words or sentences.… A language that can convey beauty and feeling, evoke memories of things known and unknown.”

Crowley said she liked to use the word ​“drawing” to describe the photographs because ​“they’re very much about time. Since they’re taken with a very slow shutter, it takes time to do the drawing.” Some ​“are very contemporary, kind of avant-garde-looking, very abstract. But they go back to what Henry Fox Talbot,” an early pioneer of photography, ​“called ​‘light drawings.’ ” For Crowley, the images reach back even further into the past. ​“The earliest kind of writing — because I see them as a kind of writing — was carved on stone tablets, or it was drawn on dark cave walls, and future generations were meant to see it.” Her images ​“are light on moving water,” which in its fleeting way, ​“goes back to the beginning of the world.”

Obtaining the images involved a healthy attitude toward how little was in Crowley’s control, and how many variables were involved. ​“Once I was in the pond, on a particular day, at a particular time, and I started to see the drawings come up, then maybe I had an idea of what kind of drawing I would get that day, but it could change very quickly, if something came by and the water moved more,” she said. ​“So the variables were the time of year, the time of day. It had to be bright sun — there wasn’t too much variation in that — but the angle of the sun was something else. Then the depth of the water,” especially whether she could see the bottom, and the water’s movement. Finally, there were camera-related variables, ​“the length of the lens, the angle at which I was photographing.”

That became part of the pleasure for Crowley; she didn’t know what she was going to get, standing in the water, her camera pointed at the waves. ​“There are a lot of variations in the photographing,” she said, ​“and I learned to work with most of them. Color, I could never control,” due to what she thinks is ​“some kind of prismatic effect” in the lens that bent the light the camera captured into different shades, reds and pinks that she didn’t see when she took the picture. ​“Some of the ones … looked black and white when I first saw them,” but ​“when I pushed the saturation up a little, out it came” — color that the lens had found. ​“With others, nothing but black and white. There was no predicting.”

She also discovered, once she had the images off her camera and on a computer screen, that the camera could ​“see things that I couldn’t see. It was like entering a secret world,” this ​“invisible world made visible by the camera, and that intrigued me enormously.” It hearkened back to the stories she loved as a child, in which the protagonists ​“escaped out of this world.”

And why shouldn’t they? ​“This world has a lot to answer for,” she added.

She had about 2,000 images to work from. Some of them ​“made me think of something,” she said. ​“A figure, or an animal. Or it could be a movement or a feeling.” They were ​“like hieroglyphs, or pictographs, or calligraphy.” From there some of them seemed ​“like parts of words, and you put them together and you’ve got a word. Maybe you have a sentence. And then you have a message.”

Hence ​“Lexicon” for the title of the show. ​“I see it as being about language. And I think of it as language for another generation, because it’s visual language — you’ll never hear it — and I think it’s a language that you can feel. It comes from the heart. But you’ll never be able to translate it.”

The images have meanings for Crowley, ​“which I do not divulge.” Some are personal. Some are just silly, she said. 

She’s less interested in conveying those specific meanings than she is in having viewers construct meaning for themselves. ​“It comes from their history, their personality, and that’s good,” she said. Beneath that process, however, is the question of whether they need to mean anything at all. ​“You don’t have to ​‘get it,’ ” Crowley said. She found the images to be ​“visually arresting”; they can just be ​“interesting to look at. Anybody can make of it what they want to.”

“Lexicon” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through March 26. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.