Remember Gestalt?

My father wanted me to describe the painting once more.
"But nothing has changed since the last time," I said.
"I want to hear it again," he insisted, hunching over in his chair to get nearer to the fire. He sounded like Frans when he was a little boy and had been told there was nothing left to eat in the hotpot. My father was often impatient during March, waiting for winter to end, the cold to ease, the sun to reappear. March was an unpredictable month, when it was never clear what might happen. Warm days raised hopes until ice and grey skies shut over the town again.
March was the month I was born in.
Being blind seemed to make my father hate winter even more. His other senses strengthened, he felt the cold acutely, smelled the stale air in the house, tasted the blandness of the vegetable stew more than my mother. He suffered when the winter was long.
I felt sorry for him. When I could I smuggled him treats from Tanneke's kitchen-- stewed cherries, dired apricots, a cold sausage, once a handful of dried rose petals I had found in Catharina's cupboard.

"The baker's daugther stands in a bright corner by the window," I began patiently. "She is facing us, but is looking out the window, down to her right. She is wearing a yellow and black fitted bodice of silk and velvet, a dark blue skirt, and a white cap that hangs down in two points below her chin."
"As you wear yours?" my father asked. He had never asked this before, though I had described the cap the same way each time.
"Yes, like mine. When you look at the cap long enough," I added hurriedly, "you see that he has not really painted it white, but blue, and violet, and yellow."
"But it's a white cap, you said."
"Yes, that's what is so strange. It's painted many colors, but when you look at it, you think it's white."
"Tile painting is much simpler," my father grumbled. " You use blue and that's all. A dark blue for the outlines, a light blue for the shadows. Blue is blue."
And a tile is a tile, I thought, and nothing like his paintings. I wanted him to understand that white was not simply white. It was a lesson my master had taught me.

"What is she doing?" he asked after a moment.
"She has one hand on a pewter pitcher sitting on a table and one on a window she's partly opened. She's about to pick up the pitcher and dump the water from it out the window, but she's stopped in the middle of what she's doing and is either dreaming or looking at something in the street."
"Which is she doing?"
"I don't know. Sometimes it seems one thing, sometimes the other."
My father sat back in his seat frowning. "First you say the cap is white but not painted white. Then you say the girl is doing one thing or mabe another. You're confusing me." He rubbed his brow as if his head ached.
"I'm sorry, Father. I'm trying to describe accurately."
"But what is the story in the painting?"
"His paintings don't tell stories."

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I had never seen a painting made from the begginning. I thought that you painted what you saw, using the colors you saw.
He taught me.
He began the painting of the baker's daughter with a layer of pale grey on the white canvas. Then he made reddish-brown marks all over it to indicate where the girl and the table and the pitcher and window and map would go. After that I thought he would begin to paint what he saw-- a girl's face, a blue skirt, a yellow and black bodice, a brown map, a silver pitcher and basin, a white wall. Instead he painted patches of color-- black where her skirt would be, ocher for the bodice and the map on the wall, red for the pitcher and the basin it sat in, another grey for the wall. They were the wrong colors-- none was the color of the thing itself. He spent a long time on these false colors, as I called them.

Somtimes the girl came and spent hour after hour standing in place, yet when i looked at the painting the next day nothing had been added or taken away. There were just areas of color that did not make things, no matter how long I studied them. I only knew what they were meant to be because I cleaned the objects themselves, and had seen what the girl was wearing when i peeked at her one day as she changed into Catharina's yellow and black bodice in the great hall.

I reluctantly set out the colors he asked for each morning. One day I put out a blue as well. The second time I laid it out he said to me, " No ultramarine, Griet. Only colors I asked for. Why did you set it out when I did not ask for it?" He was annoyed.
"I'm sorry, sir. It's just--" I took a deep breath---" she is wearing a blue skirt. I thought you would want it, rather than leaving it black."
"When I am ready, I will ask."
I nodded and turned back to polishing the lion-headed chair. My chest hurt. I did not want him to be angry at me.
He opened the middle window, filing the room with cold air.
"Come here, Griet."
I set my rag on the sill and went to him.
"Look out the window."
I looked out. It was a breezy day, with clouds disappearing behind the New Church tower.
"What color are those clouds?"
"Why, white, sir."
He raised his eyebrows slightly. " Are they?"
I glanced at them. "And grey. Perhaps it will snow."
"Come, Griet, you can do better than that. Think of your vegetables."
"My vegetables, sir?"
He moved his head slightly. I was annoying him again. My jaw tightened.
"Think of how you separated the whites. Your turnips and your onions--- are they the same white?"
Suddenly i understood. " No. The turnip has green in it, the onion yellow."
"Exactly. Now, what colors do you see in the clouds?"

"There is some blue in them," I said after studying them for a few minutes. "And---yellow as well. And there is some green!" I became so excited I actually pointed. I have been looking at clouds all my life, but I felt as if I saw them for the first time at that moment.
He smiled. "You will find there is little pure white in clouds, yet people say they are white. Now do you understand why I do not need the blue yet?"
"Yes, sir." I did not really understand, but did not want to admit it. I felt I almost knew.

When at last he began to add colors on top of the false colors, I saw what he meant. He painted a light blue over the girl's skirt, and it became a blue through which bits of black could be seen, darker in the shadow of the table, lighter closer to the window. To the wall areas he added yellow ocher, through which some fo the grey showed. It became a bright but not a white wall. When the light shone on the wall, I discovered, it was not white, but many colors.

The pitcher and basin were the most complicated--- they became yellow, and brown, and green, and blue. They reflected the pattern of the rug, the girl's bodice, the blue cloth draped over the chair--- everything but their true silver color. And yet they looked as they should, like a pitcher and a basin.

After that I could not stop looking at things.

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(Both passages taken from "Girl With A Pearl Earring" by Tracy Chevalier.)