Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Shimmering

The wind blew hard the other day, shaking the leaves into a wild dance to the ground and rustling the usual placid surface of the pond. Light glimmered and waved and shone and I was entranced. Not much got done in the studio.








12 comments:

  1. Nice. Very impressionist, Don

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  2. The top image looks like thread painting! All beautiful.

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  3. Like Fiona I immediately thought 'Monet'! Evocative

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    1. Hi Rosie, I'm not sure any of us can look at shimmering and not think Monet...do you know this poem

      Monet Refuses the Operation

      Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
      around the streetlights in Paris
      and what I see is an aberration
      caused by old age, an affliction.
      I tell you it has taken me all my life
      to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
      to soften and blur and finally banish
      the edges you regret I don't see,
      to learn that the line I called the horizon
      does not exist and sky and water,
      so long apart, are the same state of being.
      Fifty-four years before I could see
      Rouen cathedral is built
      of parallel shafts of sun,
      and now you want to restore
      my youthful errors: fixed
      notions of top and bottom,
      the illusion of three-dimensional space,
      wisteria separate
      from the bridge it covers.
      What can I say to convince you
      the Houses of Parliament dissolve
      night after night to become
      the fluid dream of the Thames?
      I will not return to a universe
      of objects that don't know each other,
      as if islands were not the lost children
      of one great continent. The world
      is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
      becomes water, lilies on water,
      above and below water,
      becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
      and white and cerulean lamps,
      small fists passing sunlight
      so quickly to one another
      that it would take long, streaming hair
      inside my brush to catch it.
      To paint the speed of light!
      Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
      burn to mix with air
      and changes our bones, skin, clothes
      to gases. Doctor,
      if only you could see
      how heaven pulls earth into its arms
      and how infinitely the heart expands
      to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

      ~ Lisel Mueller ~

      (Sixty Years of American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets)

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  4. And me too - Monet was immediately in my mind - beautiful - perhaps you should plant some waterlilies?

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    1. Thanks Charlton, there are waterlilies planted, out of these shots but I will probably do a post on them soon as the leaves have become an amazing colour.

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  5. Lovely captures. I'm sure your studio work will have the benefit of your day observing this beauty.

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    1. Thanks so much Ravenna, It's been such a beautiful fall I just can't bear to be inside, and winter is long, hopefully things will balance out.

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I appreciate your thoughts and comments; thanks for taking the time.