“Artists can color the sky red because they know it’s blue. Those of us who aren’t artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we’re stupid.”
~ Jules Feiffer
“Artists can color the sky red because they know it’s blue. Those of us who aren’t artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we’re stupid.”
~ Jules Feiffer
What’s your favorite color?
While I’d like to say I have been super-creatively-productive while away from my blog, I must confess that my journeys into both journaling and photography have been much curtailed over the past few months. I have been focusing very hard on finishing the first draft of a novel, which is monumental, yes, but the creative energy I was tapping for that project was very different from the creative energy that allows the type of expressive art I usually show here. It was a very intellectual type of creativity, intent on plot and structure and character development, necessary but not very enjoyable. Now that I am moving on to the rewriting phase, when I will start turning what I think is a good story into something artful, I can feel the need to play more with visual forms of self-expression start to kick in.
These are a couple pages from a new journal, just the start of a new journey!
While working on some passages in my current WIP, I remembered this old post describing a moment where the world seemed altered by an unusual fall of light. I thought it worth sharing again, while I work on a much overdue post about creative journaling for writers.
February 6, 2009
It was sunset, nearly, and a break in the rain made it a good time to run a quick errand. The clouds were still thick overhead, and in the east gray mountains were only darker shapes against an ominous sky.
To the west the clouds had cleared. Not completely, but a swath of blue appeared along the horizon, somewhere in the general direction of the ocean. And in the moment before the storm front could reassert its dominance over the day, the sun cast a brief, ferocious light across the valley.
Everything was caught in its golden glow – trees, hills, houses – and transformed by the stark angle of the light into something … Unreal, I thought. But at the same time more real, as if the shadows of everyday life had been burned away, leaving Plato’s ideal forms to shine through. No longer did I see a tree, a hill, a house; I saw The Tree, The Hill, The House. I saw perfection.
I briefly wished I had a camera, to capture that moment, to keep it and to share it. Instead, I have to make do with a few inadequate words (and we know language is never perfect). But even if did have a camera, and I was an expert photographer, I doubt film or pixels could have done it justice. True moments aren’t something you can replicate at will. All you can share are shadows.
I seem to have wandered away from my blog for a while…
