Enigma
Water moves. It shimmers, reflects and distorts. It can leave either a photostatic or fluid image on your optic nerve. It’s a vision circulating among your neurons and it can get stuck in your head and run through your mind like the echoes of a musical refrain.
Water is more enigma than thing. It contracts when frigid. It expands when frozen. We need it to live, yet it is nature’s strongest solvent. To an artist it can be sparkling or stagnant, flowing softly in streams, roaring down mountains, crashing against cliffs or chasing itself in river eddies. As in this painting by Emil Nolde, the French Expressionist, it can absorb colors or reflect them. It’s forever fascinating.
Allan Braley captures its power and the color tones of ferocity... yet he brings the contrasts of unlimited depth and serenity in the distance. The scene lights up with the rhythms of the universe.
Andrey Boboslowsky lets it roll or roil with the winds borrowed by boats. He paints the emotions of motion in the currents. Cloud formations roil and roll and sweep in from the horizon.
We people are mostly water. Our brains are about 80%. We were born of water and are drawn to it as a child to a parent. Like a child we cling to it. We look on it, wade in it and float on it.
To Barbara Nuss, life pulsates with and through water. Winds touch the surface and carry its vapors to the shore or the mountaintops. Birds wade, or dive or float in its marshes, streams and seas. People fashion craft to join the wind and the water together in one ever-moving symphony.
In my painting, “Holes in the Sky,” time moves in waves with the currents. Not relentlessly, but mysteriously—back and forth—in and out of the present times...and our consciousness. There are time passages through the space around us and the waters that give us life. We can travel through epochs new and old—back before trauma and PTSD took root and froze us in fear of the past that can extend to the future if we let it.
We need to embrace the enigma and flow through and with the elements to reach the understanding that lifts us to the pure spiritualism of the universe.