My friend Caroline gave me a wonderful photo of a river in Western Maryland and I painted several pieces from the one image. This painting is focused on using scraped and saved whites on the birch trees to direct the viewer into the darker places in the painting. I tried to use really loose brushwork to capture the jumpy movement of the water as it ran across the river rock. This painting is all about movement. The poem is sort of a hybrid of a Haibun, two Tanka poems with a piece of prose in the middle. Enjoy
light dances lively
river deep, dark, frigid, flows
thin white birches point
boney fingers into green
water laughs and runs away
It is alarming to me that so few people spend time outdoors, just being part of the natural world, accepting nature at face value, whether it’s cold and rainy, hot and humid, windy with clouds or hot enough to fry eggs. We have turned inward to the virtual worlds, created by very clever people, where a walk in the woods can be enjoyed without leaving the comforts of the living room sofa. It scares me that we are headed to a world of mini screens and hand-held relationships, where friends are just “likes” on a page and all of our close intimate friends are tolerated as long as they agree with myopic views of the world. Perhaps if we spent more time feeling vulnerable and slightly uncomfortable in the world nature provides; we would feel more alive, more connected, and more secure inside our own skins.
cool shadows hide dark
whispered secrets, inside dense
velvet thickets where
sparkling light flirts with water
rolls like marbles over rocks
The painting is simply marvelous. in it, the whites really direct us to the end of what is seen of the water on the river. Quite whites on logs of the trees and moving whites in the water. Thank you for sharing it and, above all, thank you for explaining to us the why and how.