blog Archives - Janet Read

Mirroring the sky

Sky mirrors water, mirrors sky; and light moves from the west to the east, dimming in its last moments.

Light catches in water and bounces back: illumines the air, shifts and turns with the wind.

Cloud bends to water, passes from one state to the other. Where does the water begin and the cloud end? Where does our breath begin?

Evening water, 30×60, oil and alkyd on canvas explores dimensions of reflection and the solemnity of light over water. Peaceful restlessness: constant fluidity and change mark the atmospheric spaces where vapour, liquid and solid collide. Levels of light and dark, opacity and clarity speak to us. We mirror the world and the world is born in us.

…..Water is another matter,
has no direction but its own bright grace,
runs through all imaginable colors,
takes limpid lessons
from stone,
and in those functionings plays out
the unrealized ambitions of the foam.

Pablo Neruda (poem, Water)

Waiting for water to remember summer

A thin skin of cat ice grew on the water last December. Ice formed rafts, floating in water that seemed as much sky as lake. In the silence ice chimed, nudging against its neighbour, building up a surface for a new world of ice huts and snowmobiles.

I visited Muir Woods near San Francisco in July on a study trip. It is a parcel of land, 554 acres, saved from logging in 1908 by President Roosevelt, named for the great naturalist John Muir. The forest was cool, fragrant, resonant with bird song and small streams springing out of the hillsides. The trees are impossibly tall: Gothic trees with leaves and sky instead of stained glass. Redwoods grow in families around a mother tree. They produce saplings in a ring creating magical shelters in circles. Even if the mother tree is burnt in a forest fire, the saplings spring up from the roots.