Push and Pull
By Bhavna Mehta
Published in The Fourth River, Spring 2024. Print Only Issue
Our home in suburban San Diego is in a low spot, in a shallow bowl sort of formation within a watershed. Once or twice a week, I check the air pressure in my wheelchair tires, grab two pairs of gloves, and leave for a push in the neighborhood—an exercise in getting away from food, screens, books, as well as commitments, frustrations, and insecurities. In three directions out of four, I will push my chair uphill to reach the closest intersection. There the ground soon levels off, the old scrubland turns into residential blocks, the rolling mesa spreads until it reaches a finger of an urban canyon.
To pull out the shadows in your artwork, you must not be afraid of darkness, of flatness. Depending on the light source, distance, angle—shadows can appear dense, or they might shimmer and flicker. They may loom in the background or occupy much of the foreground. A pleasing shadow can be made using Prussian blue; this dark color might prompt you to think of lonely nights under a full moon.
**
I am learning how to navigate a sidewalk hill and to consider how far I can push before turning back. To push uphill, I employ two main strategies. If I can be on the street instead of the sidewalk, I can zigzag my wheelchair laterally across the road on the steepest parts; this lessens the strain of ascent yet annoys the car drivers. If pushing with two arms is not efficient, I do a swift push on one wheel and then the other; imagine shoulders taking turns briskly moving forward and back. I stay on the sidewalk most of the time but cannot avoid the sideways dip of driveways, which in most cases is demanding on the shoulders in a way that is not benign. All around me, I see people walking their dogs, parents talking on cell phones pushing kids in strollers, lovers and friends walking and talking to each other, joggers, people on bicycles, students with backpacks, women in hijabs picking up their children at the school.
Look around you at objects, at light poles, at people, at plants, at a lizard basking on a brick path in the afternoon sun. The presence of light makes things visible and gives you shadows. A cast shadow is separate from the object while a form shadow is on the surface of the object. The farther a cast shadow is from the object the lighter and softer it will be. A form shadow is the less defined dark side on an object not facing the light source. Closely-spaced hatching is a satisfying way to add tonal and shading effects for form as well as cast shadows.
**
In her novel Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson writes, “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.” I don’t know. Pushing around the neighborhood is making me connect in new ways. I am thinking about what it means for me to be outside, to leave the house and start meandering around this urban space chock full of homes, gardens, churches, stores, banks, schools, parks, a library. I am a brown, middle-aged woman with polio and scoliosis, wearing an old T-shirt, pants, and shoes. Often, I struggle with what it means to have a “sense of place”. I want to invite the textures and the shadows of the neighborhood into my interior life. Perhaps I am wary of my disembodied days and want to lose track of time on mild afternoons where I might run into a neighbor or see cloud formations stretching and assembling. I long for an aimlessness in being outdoors but this longing feels misplaced—my time feels urgent—I am in pursuit of something. Invariably, I am drawn to the ordinary drama around me. There, around the next turn, lives a woman who gave me four cuttings from her flowering petunia. Put them in the ground, she said. Part of her place is now part of mine.
Be experimental regarding the surfaces on which the shadow might fall and change. The surface can be horizontal or vertical, plain or patterned. It can be your body. The surface can occupy volume, it can be solid or liquid, it can be stationary or moving. Linger to watch the shadow’s shape and size, its orientation and its movement. Trace the shadow for it will disappear with the light. As you might have noticed.
**
Some days, I spin my wheels towards the closest city park that’s located alongside a major freeway. This neighborhood is busy, noisy, active, and the park has a basketball court, a field of grass for picnics, a colorful playground with a slide. For a long challenging push to the park, I wind my way through various combinations of streets, to cul-de-sacs and back, pushing on one sidewalk, then turning around and pushing on the opposite sidewalk of the same street. The shortest route to the park—point A to point B, eyes on the prize—passes several blocks and the backside of the local elementary school where hot pink bougainvillea bushes bloom at the base of tall eucalyptus trees. I see crows, sparrows, doves, finches, and hummingbirds. In front of a home where a riot of sunflowers stand tall, I once counted seven red-masked parakeets perched and squawking on the electrical line overhead.
You can use the sharp end of a charcoal stick to make a dark line where the shadow is closest to the object. Then rub the charcoal with your finger to fill in the shadow shape, lightening the tone as you move further from the object.
**
In front of one home are rows of milkweed plants waiting for monarch butterflies to lay their eggs. In another yard, I spot a small wishing well surrounded by clumps of browning grass. I savor a well-made front porch that runs the length of one house, judge the plastic turf wherever I see it, and envy the yard that has a row of raised beds replete with fresh lettuce and kale. My shoulders feel tired and old, my elbows cramp a bit, there’s a slight pain in my right palm. I marvel at the sweat running down my sides and take a long sip of water from my bottle. A sweet and shaded balcony graces the second floor of one home, and I imagine it as a place for a private argument. Always, my eyes are tuned to notice ramps ending in doors, flat entryways, side gates to backyards that have enough room for wheelchairs to pass through. Once, a few days before Halloween, I saw a manual wheelchair—not unlike mine—in a front yard with a blue Joker costume and mask slumped in the chair. The bottoms were folded up to the knees; empty space where the legs would be.
Use a shadow to create an illusion of atmosphere, of roundedness, of dimension. You can also employ shadows to indicate mood, the quality of light, or the relationship between the elements of a landscape in terms of distance and size. Shadows can show movement, they can show the passing of time. They can cover up or highlight strangeness.
**
Once, a couple of miles from home, I fell off my chair. There was a large lip in the sidewalk—a step separation—and in going around it, I miscalculated and fell in the dirt under a large tree. Tilted on the ground, I noted it was shedding its tiny acorn-shaped seed pods. They made a nice cushion for my palms and my ass as I slid from my chair onto the earth. My shoulders can no longer lift my weight against the pull of gravity, and I needed to wait for someone to see me. In a few minutes, a young man appeared, and I asked for help. I told him what to do, and he put his wrists under my shoulders and lifted me in one swoop to set me back on my righted chair.
Technically speaking, a shadow is the absence of light. But you are not bound to that definition. Perhaps you can think of the shadow as a tether, or a way to project and witness. To shadow something is to understand its form, its edges. You can pull on these understandings to fabricate a shadow.
**
While on a push, I also need to pay attention to what’s on the sidewalk—discarded chewing gum, plastic bottles, sticky berries, loose gravel, running water sprinklers, abandoned shopping carts, fire hydrants, dead birds, pieces of glass, pavement cracks, uneven depressions, tree roots—because debris could force me off the sidewalk, cause a flat tire, or jam my wheels, pitching me forward. In spring, there are vivid purple jacaranda flowers strewn along one quiet block. In winter, lemon-yellow acacia pompoms carpet the ground not far from the city’s largest mosque. All along the long fence of one home hang passion fruit flowers on a healthy vine, and fragrant yellow-white honeysuckle grow in front of a 7-Eleven store. I once rolled by a homeless man sleeping outside this store on a tattered sleeping bag. His belongings in two black plastic bags rested against the electrical box.
A shadow is not a reflection, nor is it a representation. I remember seeing an art installation using clear acrylic rods mounted in a pattern on a white wall. The cast shadows made a pool of repeating marks on the wall that made me reflect on how even at our most transparent, our shadows make a space for secrets and sources. Maybe a shadow is about clinging and delineating at the same time.
**
Am I climbing mountains and descending into valleys as I push? Most definitely not. Do I wait to see the spreading olive tree in a front yard that signifies the end of a hill? Always. My arms are sensitive to the gentlest of hills. Pushing uphill is an effort rewarding in ways I don't accept until it is long over, and coasting downhill is a quick pleasure, a bit like flying close to the ground. To begin down a grade, I grip my back wheels and become focused on the curve, the distance to the bottom, the smallest obstacle in view. Then, acceleration and exhilaration. My triceps tense, my neck and shoulders stiffen to hold myself close to the back of the chair. Most days, I want to pull away from home with the clarity of having a home to return to.
Once you start to notice shadows, you will see them everywhere. A friend of mine notices the absence of shadows on cloudy days. This absence is like the loss of a certain kind of silence. She marks the shadows of her sculptures on the days of the solstice and considers how a shadow throws into relief essential contours while still maintaining a certain mystery, a fleeting company.
**
Sometimes, when I am pushing, I stop to pull out my cell phone and take a picture of my own shadow. Once, in the late afternoon heading west, I paused on a sidewalk and looked back. My shadow spanned the length of an entire house behind me. When my shadow is beside me, I like to see it covering a short plant or a hedge. I hold my hands out to my side and see my torso blooming from my wheelchair. In one picture I took several months ago, my silhouette is like an upturned basket capped with a female bust. I am fond of my body and my wheelchair being one in the shadow. Fascinated by this united form rooted on the road, under me, along me. When my friend walks with me, I like the way our shadows move towards and into each other. It persuades me that the darkness within her can track the one within me, even though we cannot speak of it.
Don't wait to add shadows to your practice if you are learning to draw, paint, sculpt, or write. Exaggerate or diminish your light source if possible. Give yourself permission to exaggerate or diminish yourself while making your work. Watch for your shadow self; it is imperative to see where you are the darkest, where you are the most hidden, where you are curving or blossoming, and where you are splitting now and then from your known and visible body. Looking this way takes a lifetime and still it will elude you, still you will be terrified by what you see.
**
The slopes, bends, dips, and corners of the neighborhood betray the old watershed; a topographic map reveals the geography. It is astonishing how a mesa and a canyon lock into each other. The smallest of cliffs dotted with non-native vegetation rise around me, and a road’s turn may open onto an unexpected expanse of a school parking lot. The undulations of the land beneath constructed pathways have long been tamed. Still, the sky, bright or gray or tinged with pink, spreads over everything, generous and watchful.
Follow a shadow to get to the thing. Be enticed by the shadow and dive into its aching depths. Stay a while. And yet. Be aware of the seduction of a shadow and of its on-again off-again nature. Be present in the shine of the sun, in the light of your mother’s love. Park yourself in the shade of a majestic oak and feel the spin and the pull of this magnetic earth. Light travels in a straight line but you don’t have to.
Work Cited:
Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. Picador, 2004.
Published in The Fourth River, Spring 2024. Print Only Issue
Our home in suburban San Diego is in a low spot, in a shallow bowl sort of formation within a watershed. Once or twice a week, I check the air pressure in my wheelchair tires, grab two pairs of gloves, and leave for a push in the neighborhood—an exercise in getting away from food, screens, books, as well as commitments, frustrations, and insecurities. In three directions out of four, I will push my chair uphill to reach the closest intersection. There the ground soon levels off, the old scrubland turns into residential blocks, the rolling mesa spreads until it reaches a finger of an urban canyon.
To pull out the shadows in your artwork, you must not be afraid of darkness, of flatness. Depending on the light source, distance, angle—shadows can appear dense, or they might shimmer and flicker. They may loom in the background or occupy much of the foreground. A pleasing shadow can be made using Prussian blue; this dark color might prompt you to think of lonely nights under a full moon.
**
I am learning how to navigate a sidewalk hill and to consider how far I can push before turning back. To push uphill, I employ two main strategies. If I can be on the street instead of the sidewalk, I can zigzag my wheelchair laterally across the road on the steepest parts; this lessens the strain of ascent yet annoys the car drivers. If pushing with two arms is not efficient, I do a swift push on one wheel and then the other; imagine shoulders taking turns briskly moving forward and back. I stay on the sidewalk most of the time but cannot avoid the sideways dip of driveways, which in most cases is demanding on the shoulders in a way that is not benign. All around me, I see people walking their dogs, parents talking on cell phones pushing kids in strollers, lovers and friends walking and talking to each other, joggers, people on bicycles, students with backpacks, women in hijabs picking up their children at the school.
Look around you at objects, at light poles, at people, at plants, at a lizard basking on a brick path in the afternoon sun. The presence of light makes things visible and gives you shadows. A cast shadow is separate from the object while a form shadow is on the surface of the object. The farther a cast shadow is from the object the lighter and softer it will be. A form shadow is the less defined dark side on an object not facing the light source. Closely-spaced hatching is a satisfying way to add tonal and shading effects for form as well as cast shadows.
**
In her novel Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson writes, “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.” I don’t know. Pushing around the neighborhood is making me connect in new ways. I am thinking about what it means for me to be outside, to leave the house and start meandering around this urban space chock full of homes, gardens, churches, stores, banks, schools, parks, a library. I am a brown, middle-aged woman with polio and scoliosis, wearing an old T-shirt, pants, and shoes. Often, I struggle with what it means to have a “sense of place”. I want to invite the textures and the shadows of the neighborhood into my interior life. Perhaps I am wary of my disembodied days and want to lose track of time on mild afternoons where I might run into a neighbor or see cloud formations stretching and assembling. I long for an aimlessness in being outdoors but this longing feels misplaced—my time feels urgent—I am in pursuit of something. Invariably, I am drawn to the ordinary drama around me. There, around the next turn, lives a woman who gave me four cuttings from her flowering petunia. Put them in the ground, she said. Part of her place is now part of mine.
Be experimental regarding the surfaces on which the shadow might fall and change. The surface can be horizontal or vertical, plain or patterned. It can be your body. The surface can occupy volume, it can be solid or liquid, it can be stationary or moving. Linger to watch the shadow’s shape and size, its orientation and its movement. Trace the shadow for it will disappear with the light. As you might have noticed.
**
Some days, I spin my wheels towards the closest city park that’s located alongside a major freeway. This neighborhood is busy, noisy, active, and the park has a basketball court, a field of grass for picnics, a colorful playground with a slide. For a long challenging push to the park, I wind my way through various combinations of streets, to cul-de-sacs and back, pushing on one sidewalk, then turning around and pushing on the opposite sidewalk of the same street. The shortest route to the park—point A to point B, eyes on the prize—passes several blocks and the backside of the local elementary school where hot pink bougainvillea bushes bloom at the base of tall eucalyptus trees. I see crows, sparrows, doves, finches, and hummingbirds. In front of a home where a riot of sunflowers stand tall, I once counted seven red-masked parakeets perched and squawking on the electrical line overhead.
You can use the sharp end of a charcoal stick to make a dark line where the shadow is closest to the object. Then rub the charcoal with your finger to fill in the shadow shape, lightening the tone as you move further from the object.
**
In front of one home are rows of milkweed plants waiting for monarch butterflies to lay their eggs. In another yard, I spot a small wishing well surrounded by clumps of browning grass. I savor a well-made front porch that runs the length of one house, judge the plastic turf wherever I see it, and envy the yard that has a row of raised beds replete with fresh lettuce and kale. My shoulders feel tired and old, my elbows cramp a bit, there’s a slight pain in my right palm. I marvel at the sweat running down my sides and take a long sip of water from my bottle. A sweet and shaded balcony graces the second floor of one home, and I imagine it as a place for a private argument. Always, my eyes are tuned to notice ramps ending in doors, flat entryways, side gates to backyards that have enough room for wheelchairs to pass through. Once, a few days before Halloween, I saw a manual wheelchair—not unlike mine—in a front yard with a blue Joker costume and mask slumped in the chair. The bottoms were folded up to the knees; empty space where the legs would be.
Use a shadow to create an illusion of atmosphere, of roundedness, of dimension. You can also employ shadows to indicate mood, the quality of light, or the relationship between the elements of a landscape in terms of distance and size. Shadows can show movement, they can show the passing of time. They can cover up or highlight strangeness.
**
Once, a couple of miles from home, I fell off my chair. There was a large lip in the sidewalk—a step separation—and in going around it, I miscalculated and fell in the dirt under a large tree. Tilted on the ground, I noted it was shedding its tiny acorn-shaped seed pods. They made a nice cushion for my palms and my ass as I slid from my chair onto the earth. My shoulders can no longer lift my weight against the pull of gravity, and I needed to wait for someone to see me. In a few minutes, a young man appeared, and I asked for help. I told him what to do, and he put his wrists under my shoulders and lifted me in one swoop to set me back on my righted chair.
Technically speaking, a shadow is the absence of light. But you are not bound to that definition. Perhaps you can think of the shadow as a tether, or a way to project and witness. To shadow something is to understand its form, its edges. You can pull on these understandings to fabricate a shadow.
**
While on a push, I also need to pay attention to what’s on the sidewalk—discarded chewing gum, plastic bottles, sticky berries, loose gravel, running water sprinklers, abandoned shopping carts, fire hydrants, dead birds, pieces of glass, pavement cracks, uneven depressions, tree roots—because debris could force me off the sidewalk, cause a flat tire, or jam my wheels, pitching me forward. In spring, there are vivid purple jacaranda flowers strewn along one quiet block. In winter, lemon-yellow acacia pompoms carpet the ground not far from the city’s largest mosque. All along the long fence of one home hang passion fruit flowers on a healthy vine, and fragrant yellow-white honeysuckle grow in front of a 7-Eleven store. I once rolled by a homeless man sleeping outside this store on a tattered sleeping bag. His belongings in two black plastic bags rested against the electrical box.
A shadow is not a reflection, nor is it a representation. I remember seeing an art installation using clear acrylic rods mounted in a pattern on a white wall. The cast shadows made a pool of repeating marks on the wall that made me reflect on how even at our most transparent, our shadows make a space for secrets and sources. Maybe a shadow is about clinging and delineating at the same time.
**
Am I climbing mountains and descending into valleys as I push? Most definitely not. Do I wait to see the spreading olive tree in a front yard that signifies the end of a hill? Always. My arms are sensitive to the gentlest of hills. Pushing uphill is an effort rewarding in ways I don't accept until it is long over, and coasting downhill is a quick pleasure, a bit like flying close to the ground. To begin down a grade, I grip my back wheels and become focused on the curve, the distance to the bottom, the smallest obstacle in view. Then, acceleration and exhilaration. My triceps tense, my neck and shoulders stiffen to hold myself close to the back of the chair. Most days, I want to pull away from home with the clarity of having a home to return to.
Once you start to notice shadows, you will see them everywhere. A friend of mine notices the absence of shadows on cloudy days. This absence is like the loss of a certain kind of silence. She marks the shadows of her sculptures on the days of the solstice and considers how a shadow throws into relief essential contours while still maintaining a certain mystery, a fleeting company.
**
Sometimes, when I am pushing, I stop to pull out my cell phone and take a picture of my own shadow. Once, in the late afternoon heading west, I paused on a sidewalk and looked back. My shadow spanned the length of an entire house behind me. When my shadow is beside me, I like to see it covering a short plant or a hedge. I hold my hands out to my side and see my torso blooming from my wheelchair. In one picture I took several months ago, my silhouette is like an upturned basket capped with a female bust. I am fond of my body and my wheelchair being one in the shadow. Fascinated by this united form rooted on the road, under me, along me. When my friend walks with me, I like the way our shadows move towards and into each other. It persuades me that the darkness within her can track the one within me, even though we cannot speak of it.
Don't wait to add shadows to your practice if you are learning to draw, paint, sculpt, or write. Exaggerate or diminish your light source if possible. Give yourself permission to exaggerate or diminish yourself while making your work. Watch for your shadow self; it is imperative to see where you are the darkest, where you are the most hidden, where you are curving or blossoming, and where you are splitting now and then from your known and visible body. Looking this way takes a lifetime and still it will elude you, still you will be terrified by what you see.
**
The slopes, bends, dips, and corners of the neighborhood betray the old watershed; a topographic map reveals the geography. It is astonishing how a mesa and a canyon lock into each other. The smallest of cliffs dotted with non-native vegetation rise around me, and a road’s turn may open onto an unexpected expanse of a school parking lot. The undulations of the land beneath constructed pathways have long been tamed. Still, the sky, bright or gray or tinged with pink, spreads over everything, generous and watchful.
Follow a shadow to get to the thing. Be enticed by the shadow and dive into its aching depths. Stay a while. And yet. Be aware of the seduction of a shadow and of its on-again off-again nature. Be present in the shine of the sun, in the light of your mother’s love. Park yourself in the shade of a majestic oak and feel the spin and the pull of this magnetic earth. Light travels in a straight line but you don’t have to.
Work Cited:
Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. Picador, 2004.