Still Life Watercolors

Stepping Stones is so strangely beautiful this morning. The sun is eclipsed by heavy clouds just so where the sun can actually be seen to the naked eye without discomfort. The cloud, fog, or mist is a violet shade. Some of the trees nearby have lost their leaves and appear as eerie skeletons backlit by the hazy sunshine. They appear as form lacking substance next to their fully clothed neighbors yet untouched by the cold hand of late autumn. Stepping Stone and the valley seem from another world whose unusual beauty leaves the witness a little hesitant to return to the familiar world of color and substance. The violet grayness of the mist beckons the imagination to enter this world of monotones, where colors are subdued and the boundaries of forms are not sharply defined. All is hazy, soft and ephemeral as a painting whose artist touched the canvas with gently applied strokes of the brush, not yet delineating the many intended manifestations of finer detail.

But as I watch, a buck chases a doe and the still-life painting becomes a beautiful world of the everyday richness of Stepping Stones and beyond. And I return from the realm of the imagination to that of reality and see how very similar they are this morning. Only the artists have exchanged places.