Perhaps the largest artistic choice I made in my painting was to paint the mountain and river with only blue. I recognize that the monochromatic scheme conflicts with Shelley’s description of the Arve as “many color’d,” though I believe the piece ultimately gained more from the loss of the spectrum of colors than it would have preserved with the rainbow of greens and grays that might have otherwise adorned the river and mountain (Shelley 13). The monochromatic scheme allowed me to reduce nature to portray the mountain as even more silent than it might be in full color. This choice followed my desire to emphasize Shelley’s acknowledgment of a unique dynamic between silence and perceived vacancy that might conflict with sublimity, where the mountain is both starkly powerful and silently at the mercy of the viewer to recognize its sublimity: “And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea / If to the human mind’s imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy,” (Shelley 142-144). Essentially, through my piece as in Shelley’s poetry, the mountain is only completely sublime when a viewer can see beyond the silence and solitude of nature to appreciate it as more than vacant.
I hope the monochromatic “silence” of my piece, especially as it still conveys much of the sublimity of the physical scene described by Shelley through natural subject matter, will also force the viewer to recognize the boundaries of their appreciation for Mont Blanc and, by extension, other elements of nature. I chose blue for my monochromatic color because it matches the softness of audible silence, though the blue-painted mountain is hopefully appreciated despite the limited color in my piece, just as the very real mountains, stars, earth, and sea are, despite what might typically be conceived as vacancy due to silence or lack of human bustle. Through the absence of a complex color palate, the viewer should come to appreciate the painted mountain as sublime despite limits to a usual perception of the mountain in much the same way human "imaginings" might of the mountain be constrained by perceptions of it as silent (Shelley 143). On the contrary, a viewer could understand the muted color scheme of my piece to more directly support Shelley's admiring description of the actual mountain when my mountain--further from its natural form without assorted and contrasting colors--loses some sublimity as the white peaks no longer rise as distinctly from the lower crags, nor battle the sky’s softness. All of these choices should lead the viewer to ponder a more complex view of natural sublimity that includes silence as much as it does conflict, without mistaking silence for vacancy.