dragonflies and snowflakes seen through the porthole

                ATS

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 30 March, 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

                                                                                16H

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 30 March, 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Two studies from the other night which revealed something slightly new for me. I see that if I wait long enough, but not too long, there opens a fragile window onto a map of delicate colour harmonies which beckon me way after the sun has dropped behind. It is a small opening though, a porthole, hardly 30 minutes when this Autumn sky gently diffuses into the most extraordinary palette. 

Maybe I sound redundant because I am sure to  have already written these thoughts on a number of occasions in these pages. 

It is not that the sky has changed of course. It is that I have opened up to this new delicacy as if suddenly I acquired a passion for some unusual new hobby like catching and classifying dragonflies or the photography of snowflakes.

It is something so ever present, usually overlooked, banal even, but which becomes a sudden passion, perhaps like knowing a woman since a long time, but one day, quite out of the blue, one suddenly sees her, and falls deeply in love. And one is spellbound by the event.

After all, the clouds have always been there, up high and just out of reach since forever even if most people do not spend a great deal of time studying them the way children and misfits can, and usually do.

So in this Painting world, I am always amazed that Nature reveals more of itself just when needed, like when one wonders if maybe they have hit a dead end on their chosen path.

I keep thinking of something Cézanne said:

"There is truth in Nature, and I am going to prove it".

Alas, for the rest of us amateurs, we slog along behind him ruminating his confidence and hoping to pick up scraps of it along the way.