Tracery

Happy New year ! Here we are in 2009. I dallied about for two weeks during the holidays, not quite working, not quite on vacation. sleeping, eating, clearing up my studio and this appeared in the window one lovely grey morning. I ran for the camera, loving it and loving the concept that my camera needed to spend a little more time with me and we bonded quite well over the next few days. I love the colors in this...exactly what I was seeing, those lavenders and golds. someone once tried to tell me I was wearing clashing colors due to a gold sweater and purple pants. Humph. Obviously they didn't take in dawn's early light.. I love the tracery. Is this why we love lace so much ? Because we see such delicate lines of open work stretched across the wintery lights? Magical lights and darks. They were a little bit hypnotizing to watch as the colors changed and the sun rose up. another reason to love my aerie studio.

Christmas week promised to be icey, though it actually warmed as we got closer to Christmas Eve. I saw more lacey patterns stretched across the lake. Every once in awhile I would hear a huge cracking sound, like a gunshot, but it was only the ice. As cold as it was there was a kind of softness in the day, perhaps in being all bundled up as I walked the path around the lake and through the bird sanctuary. Perhaps it was the colors, soft blue grey, warm gold, smokey lavenders. Who wouldn't want to paint this? who wouldn't want to be in the painting?

Off into the woods, I half expected to see elves of some sort wandering about scouting for bits of twig and mushroom as I was. If you look very carefully you can almost see a few stange and wonderful shapes in that small piece of foreground, something to build a fairy tale on, something to dream about a bit later as you sit sipping your wine after a fine dinner, wondering if imagination commands perception or vice versa. Perhaps it is better to simply accept that imagination, set loose from videos and television can take one on a fine journey on grey winter's day... or on a summer's day or on any day at all. Ask Louis Carroll, or J. M. Barrie , Dr. Suess or Jim Henson..all my heros, all my friends. Especially when I am considering the tracery of perception.