Becoming Art

First there’s color, then form.

I like being a passenger, pressing my face to the glass, craning my neck until it hurts and I lose the landscape that I pass through. It becomes an abstraction, no line defined between sky and earth.

Each blade of grass changes with reflected light and green is no longer green. Blue has a language of its own. Yellow tiptoes in.

I squint to find the reds which usually translate as crimson, accentuated with purple, that I am certain, in the moment, no one else can see. Of course there are flowers on that hillside but we are always moving so fast.

Water is baffling, the textures shift with every movement of the air. I want to say, “Stand still while I paint you!” But it is relentless in its determination to gnaw at the shore and shift the stones that shush against each other.

I open the shutter, drag the speed of the exposure, and close my eyes as if the click! will do anything other than capture the contours of a single moment when the light of the day hangs around long enough for me to thank it.