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| Patch #37 ... sadly the subtle yellow/blue/green color of the over-dyed linen has been totally lost in the process of photographing it |
Walking out a half hour before sunrise, the stars had fled from the sky ... even Venus was fading. But the crescent moon revealed its shadowed side as a mercury glass mirror of Earth's reflected light. And below the moon, a tiny glint ... at last, the planet Mercury. Between them, the orbs described a classic Pythagorean triangle: three lengths from the moon to Mercury, four lengths from the moon to Venus, and five lengths from Venus to Mercury.
The horizon was golden below a sky that rose above it from green to blue to grey ... colors shifting like the sea.
Coming back into the house, I grabbed a pen and scribbled ...
Then, after breakfast, hunted down a yellow linen shirt over-dyed with Aquarelle Saxon Blue extract ...
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and on a scrap of that cloth, I took the finest stitches I could manage to describe my recollection ...
But time and cloth and camera each imposed a degree of separation from what my eyes first perceived. The patch as memory ended up as most memories do: an imperfect reflection of the infinite subtlety that is first-hand experience.
Likewise, as another week passes by, the weather patches are the merest shorthand ...
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for golden days of sunlit dryness broken only by the heavy fog that ushered in February ...
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The transformation and subsequent loss of first hand experience to the clunky limitations of material expression is always frustrating. Fortunately the energy of memory can be retained and the made object basks in it. I love your moon and planet notation, and I think the year of rainfall is going to be a stunning thing.
ReplyDeleteThank you for all of this ... it occurs to me (not for the first time) that the exercise of trying to capture image on cloth is much the same as trying capture a life in memoir. Both futile, but absolutely worth the effort.
Deletethe shirt scrap was as if it all was foreordained
ReplyDeleteSadly, the patch was too small to capture the transition from yellow to green. Fortunately, as Dana points out, the memory remains.
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