Three to Share: Beauty, Art, Place

Tags

art, Blogging, blogs, inspiration, Nature, photography, quotations

I love discovering new blogs that inspire me and want to share three, among many, that I discovered this past year.

The Beauty We Love

I turn to this one often, for the captivating images as well as the inspiring quotations. Two I enjoyed most recently were by John Muir, the first enticing us to saunter reverently rather than “hike” when we are out among nature. He tells us how the word “saunter” comes from pilgrims who are traveling through France  ‘A la sainte terre’, or  ‘To the Holy Land.’ Another reminds us that we are kin to everything

When we try to pick out anything by itself,

we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell,

 and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals

 as friendly fellow mountaineers.

Recently I featured another post I loved in Seeing the Self in What We Love.

Then there was Wild Elegance, which speaks to why I named this blog Living on the Edge of the Wild. John O’Donohue from The Invisible Embrace, Beauty writes:

When we acknowledge the wild beauty of God, we begin to glimpse the potential holiness of our neglected wildness.  As humans, citizens and believers, we have become domesticated beyond belief.  We have fallen out of rhythm with our natural wildness.  What we now call ‘being wild’ is often misshapen, destructive and violent.  The natural wildness as the fluency of the soul at one with beauty is foreign to us.

The call of the wild is a call to the elemental levels of the soul, the places of intuition, kinship, swiftness, fluency and the consolation of the lonesome that is not lonely.  Our fear of our own wildness derives in part from our fear of the formless; but the wild is not the formless – it holds immense refinement and, indeed, clarity.  The wild has a profound simplicity that carries none of the false burdens of brokenness or self-conflict; it flows naturally as one, elegant and seamless.

And moreover:

Beauty invites us towards profound elegance of soul.  It reminds us that we are heirs to elegance and nobility of spirit and encourages us to awaken the divinity within us.  We are no longer trapped in mental frames of self-reduction or self-denunciation.

Instead, we feel the desire to celebrate, to give ourselves over to the dance of joy and delight.   The overwhelming beauty which is God pervades the texture of our soul, transforming all smallness, limitation and self-division.  The mystics speak of the excitement of such unity.  This is how Marguerite Porete describes it:

 ‘Such a Soul, says Love swims in the sea of joy, that is in the sea of delights, flowing and running out of the Divinity.  And so she feels no joy, for she is joy itself.  She swims and flows in Joy… for she dwells in Joy and Joy dwells in her.’

The Eclectic Light Company – Paintings

For a stroll through art history and a survey of some of the major and minor artists through the ages, I love to visit this site, which always inspires and enlightens.

The painting that headlines this post is from his site by a lesser known artist, or at least new to me, Maria Fortuny’s painting of Portici Beach in Spain.

The best of his 2018 paintings and articles can be found at this link. It’s a two-parter, so don’t miss this one as well.

For a preview of what he’ll be covering this your, make sure you check out this link.

The Depth of Now

This blog satisfies my longing for travel, art, photography, soulful writing, and that fearsome urge to trust oneself in exploring the unknown. Here a young woman tells about uprooting herself to move to a new city, Istanbul, which she explores through photography and storytelling.

In her favorite posts of 2018 you can taste some of the many flavors she has to offer: joyful wisdom, finding home, writing about place, Istanbul street art, and more.

I also loved her interview with photographer John Wreford. She’s a wonderful photographer herself, and I think that’s how I met her, at a cemetery in Prague.

But where I fell in love with her blog was when I read Home is Where the Heart Is,  where she converses with a stranger she meets in a medieval courtyard and writes:

We talked about how everything at its core is fluid and he talked to me about the Tao Te Ching.

And suddenly we had left the party and were slowly meandering down the road of a deep conversation. And by deep, I mean that reality started to lose its edges as we both came to an agreement on certain points other than what is conventionally accepted.

I admitted to him that I had lived in so many places that I no longer could relate to home being somewhere outside myself. That secretly I was building my home within – letting go of the stuff of this world and instead focusing on the things that I can take with me when I die – the wisdom and knowledge of the world that may (or may not) serve me in the next life.

You see, I don’t believe that we die because what is there to die into? Everything is alive and remains alive in one form or another.

And something tells me that I have lived many lives because from time to time I remember something unusual. I will have a dream that will take me to another place so real that I must have been there before.

I hope you will fall in love with these blogs I discovered this past year as I have. And, please, share some of the favorites sites you’ve discovered with me too in the comments below.

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2018 – A Look Back, a Look Forward

Tags

art, Blogging, Novel, painting, personal, travel, writing

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The end of a year always signals a kind of reckoning for me, the urge to look back and assess and celebrate, and to look forward and gauge where I want or need to go next.

Looking back through my blog posts, I see three major themes: travel, art, and writing.

Travel

It started with A Slice of San Francisco and a look at the Fascinating Faces and Divine Bodies at the Asian Art Museum.

Then I took a sharp turn left turn in Romancing Europe. I wrote about Dancing through Time & Space, and Tasting Life Twice. I took readers on a tour through Segovia and Bruges, and into the Musee d’Orsay, the Casa Battlo and Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and Down the Rabbit Hole with Salvador Dali.

Art

Art was a big theme with all the museums I visited, but also on a personal note with my own painting. I heralded my New Home Studio with a tour, and bragged about my first public recognition for my art. I showed off  Flowing Leaves, Tangled Limbs, Folding Hills, and Trees and More Trees.

My most popular post this year was the Art of Living, A Reminder.

Writing

I started off in January with a post on why I write in Walking each Other Home. In May I celebrated finding an agent for my novel From the Far Ends of the Earth in Pinch Me! In June I wrote about Following the Yellow-Brick Road to publishing, and in December I wrote about Happy and not so happy Endings in novel writing and life. In this last post and an earlier one on A Walk on the Wild Side, another theme that weaves through the underside of much of my writing in one way or another surfaces, the heartbreak of addiction.

A Look Ahead – What I Want Most

A happy ending for my son.

A happy ending for my novel.

More novel-writing, more painting, more blogging.

More artful living.

More Love. Lots and lots of love, for all of us.

A happy new year to you all!

 

O Holy Night, Images Sacred & Sublime

Tags

art, Christmas, Christmas music, inspiration, O Holy Night, photography, universe

Star_birth_in_Messier_83_(captured_by_the_Hubble_Space_Telescope)

I’ve gathered some images, sacred and sublime, to scroll through as you listen to “O Holy Night“, one of my favorite Christmas carols.

I love this song, not only for the haunting melody and beautiful  lyrics, but also because night has always seemed holy to me.

When I walk out beneath the stars on a cold or balmy night, I’m awestruck by such beauty and mystery and magnificence. I feel humbled and incredibly grateful, as if witnessing the hand of the divine writ large across the sky.

The images below are my gift to you. They reflect what this season is all about for me, a sense of the sacred and sublime–scenes of the birth of Christ and families celebrating Christmas.

Photos of spectacular sunsets and winter wonderlands–nature in all her glory.

And finally, images of an infinite universe stretching out and wrapping about the earth as if we were a holy gift just waiting to be unwrapped.

Enjoy!

 

Walters – The Adoration of the Shepherds

Peter Paul Rubens – The Adoration of the Magi

 

Paul Gauguin – Christmas Night (The Blessing of the Oxen)

Attributed to Carel Fabritius

Heilige_Familie_und_Hirten_im_Stal

From Christmas throughout Christendom – The Christmas Tree

Viggo Johansen – A Christmas Story

Waiting for Father Christmas – Theodor Hildebrandt

Glorious Sunset

A White Christmas

Blackbirds flock at Nightfall

Frosty Trees in Winter Wonderland

Cosmic Skies over Bali

Northern Lights over Greenland

Stars trailing through the night

Earth Rises in the Night

Hubble_Directly_Observes_Planet_Orbiting_Fomalhaut

Night Mist as seen by Hubble

Cartwheel Galaxy

Orion as seen by Hubble

The Milky Way Galaxy

Our home Earth wrapped up in the Milky Way Galaxy

(First posted in 2012)

Pied Beauty, Poem & Paintings

Tags

art, artists, beauty, Gerard Manley Hopkins, inspiration, music, Nature, Paintings, Pied Beauty, poetry

Wassily Kandinsky, Waterfall II

Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

What is it about “dappled” things that so dazzles us?

I ran across this poem, a favorite of mine, not long ago, and was reminded once again of how much nature inspires and excites us. Painters as well as poets have been praising that pied beauty through their artwork down the ages.

A few of my favorite paintings praising dappled things follows.

Vincent Van Gogh

John Singer Sargeant

John Singer Sargeant

John Singer Sargeant

John Singer Sargeant

Gertrude Fiske

Anne Redpath

Rick Stevens, Immersed

Gustav Klimt

New Paintings, the Folding Hills of California

Tags

art, California, inspiration, Nature, oil pastel, painting, watercolor

I’ve long loved the way the rolling hills along the coast of California fold together and overlap, the sensuality of that “hot rise and cool dip.”  I’ve tried to capture a bit of that fascination in some of my poetry: Hot Hills in Summer Heat, and Playing with Light, loving the way the light falls upon those folds so that “the hills unwind, one at a time, to dance before us all.”

Lately I’ve been trying to capture some of that in a few paintings, some inspired by the work of other artists and some from my own photographs. I’m not wholly satisfied with any of them, but something of what I’m trying to capture comes through.

This first is watercolor and oil pastel, and even a brush of soft chalk pastel in the sea and highlighting the closest hill. This was inspired by a Dale Laitinen painting of the coastline along Highway 1 near our home called.

The one above and below were inspired by a local and much-loved artist Erin Hanson who works mostly in oil. My painting above is again oil pastel and watercolor on Arches cold press paper, which has much more texture than the smoother hot press Fabriano paper used in the other oil pastel paintings in this post.

This one was also inspired by Hanson which I painted some time ago in acrylic. I’ve only created three works in acrylic so far, but for some reason I feel intimidated by it. I’m not sure why.  The three I painted out came out well enough. Of course, none of these inspired by other artists come even close to the quality of the original works. But I learn so much each time I try.

This one and the one below are from my own photographs taken of the hillsides on my walks around our neighborhood. They come closer to those “folding hills” I wrote about earlier, “the hot rise and cool dip” in my poems. Both are oil pastel and watercolor on hot press paper.

In this last one I wanted to see what the hills would look like stripped down and closer. I’m not sure which version I like best. The mattings help a lot to set off the works. Someday I will learn to photograph my paintings better. That might help too (smile.)

Thank you for bearing with me as I try to learn this craft and share my efforts. It’s a fascinating pastime.

[Note: I created this post before the latest round of fires set these hills ablaze north and south of where we live. My heart goes out to all who have lost their lives and homes, and seen their communities destroyed, including the wildlife that inhabits these hills and forests.]

 

 

New Paintings, Trees and More Trees

Tags

art, creative process, Mixed Media, oil pastel, painting, trees, watercolor

Three new paintings, part of my forest series, I suppose, but really just playing with styles and possibilities. All three were inspired by paintings from artists I admire. All using watercolor and oil pastel on hot pressed paper.

The first two are both very dense, but the style quite distinct. My husband wasn’t too fond of these. He wants a place to let the eye in, or at least a place to rest away from all that color. The one above has a lighter, feathery feel. I enjoyed painting this and I felt quite light and feathery painting it.  It was done quickly. The one below has a heavier, slicker feel.

It took more time. It feels more surreal, more fauvist (an orgy of color), and I think that’s what I was aiming for. I say “I think” because I’m drawn toward the fauvists, the unruly works of Derain, Matisse, Manguin, etc, during that early period, and I was painting more by feel than thought.

This last didn’t turn out at all like I had planned. It was supposed to be more abstract, and the background filled with forest, not sky. But I think I was unconsciously influenced by my husband’s remarks about the first two, and so I let the sky in. A place to dip into and out of the scene.

I hope readers of this blog understand that I am just playing with paint, trying to learn a craft for my own enjoyment and amusement.

But as an art lover, I also see this past-time as art exploration. I’m teaching myself to see as an artist might, to explore what different mediums can do, to get a feel for different styles, different ways to compose a scene, to improvise on nature, to abstract from reality a sense of its feel or flavor.

But mostly I do this just to immerse myself in pure color, and to get lost in “no words.”

“Something in This Sleeping Earth” – Two by Whyte, One by Fiske

Tags

art, Blogging, David Whyte, Earth, Gertrude Fiske, inspiration, Nature, poem, poetry, spirituality

Gertrude Fiske, American Impressionist

All My Body Calls

All my body calls
for something in this sleeping
earth
we call the spirit.

But how
from lifted arms
where stars run through fingers
and the night is like sand
do I breathe a fragrance of its wisdom
do I call its name
or listen to the drops
that trickle down to earth
and hear
life being given
not only through the moving hands of the forest
but through the hand that reaches in
the dark unmoving regions of the chest
and uncovers slowly
the enormous
indistinct
shape of the ocean.

by David Whyte

Fallen in Love

That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew then, as I had before
life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.

It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

by David Whyte

What struck me in the poems and the painting is that “something in this sleeping earth” that we are only half-awake to, what Whyte calls “spirit.” I see that spirit clearly in the painting by Friske, the two women immersed in the forest, in that yellow-green light, in those parting branches, those “moving hands.”

And in the second poem, that sense that there’s nothing to wait for, it’s all out here in the open, “speaking out loud in the clear air,”  as solid and humble and astonishing as the ground beneath our bare feet.

In another poem, Whyte writes:

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

What are we waiting for? Especially in these trying times.

All times are trying. All lives are trying. We have to grasp, right here, right now, despite all that, what’s waiting half-hidden all around us this very moment.

Many thanks to The Beauty We Love where I found these poems, and to The Uncarved Blog who shared two wondrous poems by Stephen Levine and pointed me toward this site. It’s one of the things I love about blogging, finding these hidden treasures that speak so eloquently to things I feel and cannot say. 

Inside the Holy Grove of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia

Tags

Antonio Gaudi, architecture, art, cathedral, church, inspiration, La Sagrada Familia, travel

Stepping inside La Sagrada Familia cathedral is like walking into an enchanted forest. Your gaze goes and up and up, following the trunks of  trees toward light-filled branches.

The forest is made up of several kinds of stone, so each tree trunk has its own subtle shade, some leaning red, others green. They branch out at the top into smaller and smaller columns, like fingers stretching out to hold up an impossibly ornate ceiling.

Only it’s not a ceiling at all, but a canopy of leaves and stars woven tightly together, as you would find in any forest grove.

Toward the right of the main entrance is the heart of the cathedral with two massive organs and rows of pews for worship. There floating  beneath an umbrella of lights is the upward-gazing figure of the Christ.

Along the sides of the main chamber are spiraling staircases moving up the towers, to what and where, I do not know.

Colored light floods the cathedral, streaming through the stained glass windows, or projected along the walls and columns, flowing from blue to green, and gold to scarlet,

Glimpses of the crypts below can be seen through artful cut-outs in the stone.

 

Toward the exit is a large loggia featuring some of the furnishings Gaudi created for the cathedral, and a single simple painting, capturing the tenderness and grief at the fallen Son.

Below are two virtual tours of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. The first video is very short and gives you a 360 degree view of the interior main chamber. The second video, which takes around five minutes, shows both the exterior and interior, with some lovely aerial shots outside, while inside the church is full of worshipers during its consecration mass.

 

All the still photos in this post are my own except for the ceiling shot which came from Wikipedia.

My last blog post features the exterior of La Sagrada Familia and tells more about its creation.

 

“A Terrifying & Edible Beauty,” Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia

Tags

Antoni Gaudi, architecture, art, Barcelona, beauty, cathedral, church, inspiration, La Segrada Familia, travel

This stunning cathedral, a tribute to Antonio Gaudi’s genius and imagination, his love of God and Nature, was begun in 1882 and is still a work in progress. It’s hoped to be completed by the centennial of Gaudi’s death in 2026, but many believe it will stretch well beyond that date.

“There is no reason to regret that I cannot finish the church,” Gaudi wrote. “I will grow old but others will come after me. What must always be conserved is the spirit of the work, but its life has to depend on the generations it is handed down to and with whom it lives and is incarnated.”

“La Sagrada Família is made by the people and is mirrored in them. It is a work that is in the hands of God and the will of the people.”

On it’s completion, it will tower 560 feet, slightly less than the the highest natural landmark in the vicinity, Montjuïc hill . Gaudi believed that nothing should rise higher than the hand of God, and he revered Nature, not only as God’s handiwork, but as the inspiration for all that can be called art. “Nothing is art if it does not come from nature,” he once famously said. Therefore his buildings have no straight lines or sharp corners because “there are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature.”

Already his structure dominates the surrounding city of Barcelona, and it is only one-half of its envisioned height.

The model below shows what the completed structure is meant to look like, but only the brown parts are currently built.

Salvadore Dali referred to La Sagrada’s “terrifying and edible beauty.” Art historian Nikolaus Pevsner likened its growth to “sugar loaves and anthills.” Time Magazine found it “sensual, spiritual, whimsical, exuberant!” While George Orwell called it “one of the most hideous buildings in the world.”

I have to admit when I first saw it from the street its hugeness combined with its extremely ornate facade topped by construction cranes made the whole affair seem monstrous and grotesque. But upon closer inspection I found it fascinating and inspiring. Like Gaudi’s Casa Bottla, which I wrote about recently, around every corner, from every new angle, wherever my eye rested I discovered some new surprising detail to delight me.

The facade at front entrance to the cathedral, which celebrates the birth of Christ, is sumptuously ornate, as you see in the photos above. But as you pass through the building to the back entrance, commemorating Christ’s death, the style becomes more stark, with sharper lines, giving it a modern feel, as you see below.

Some of the most interesting and intricate parts of the exterior were the huge portals, the doors through which you pass from the exterior into the heart of the cathedral..

And here at the portal of Gaudi’s masterpiece I will leave you, saving the equally fascinating interior for my next post.

Painting Again, Forest Series

Tags

abstract, art, forest, Mixed Media, Nature, oil pastel, painting, Paintings, trees, watercolor

I’ve started painting again, keeping toward the abstract, still experimenting with water-color and oil pastel, letting them show me how well they play together.

I’d been inspired by some of Rick Steven’s paintings, his intense close-ups of trees and barks. I love the colors, the texture, the shapes.

The painting above was my initial attempt. At first it seemed too vertical, too placid, so I began to build up the horizontal elements, the “foliage,” and finally came to the place where it seemed “done.”

Next I wanted to do a close-up of a shapely tree trunk, and again I was dissatisfied. Too vertical, no clear focus. So I began to add areas of “lichen,” I suppose you could call it, at the lower right and upper left. Something to attract the eye and allow it to move up or down the trunk. At some point it too seemed “complete.” This one may be my favorite of the three. I like the richness of the colors, the texture.

I’m not sure where the last one came from. I wanted to add a human element into the natural, something partially hidden, peeking out, more figurative than figure. The blue sprite appeared. But further down the tree trunk another face emerged, unbidden. With that addition, the painting took on a more ominous than playful feel. Not what I had intended at all. I’m not sure I like this one.  But it haunts me.