Walking up through lush forest
over juniper brush
out to the water.
Speechless, remembering Goethe’s lines
Bilde, Kuenstler! Rede nicht!
Nur ein Hauch sei dein Gedicht.
(Create, artist! Talk not!
Only a whiff be your poem)
Dunes and Lake
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Andante, lento, stando
Birgit,
I loved the shimmering blue lake (almost looks like a sea to me). Gave me a good feeling when I walked back into work this morning… Where were these pictures taken?
Sunil,
At the Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan, on a Great Lake.
Ah! That explains the ‘sea’ feel.
Thanks
Birgit,
You capture, in this bit of narrative photography, that sense of enclosure and enticement of the path that leads to a dazzling opening.
The last photo has a fine composition by the way — the dunes layer on the diagonal and then the horizon emerges as a straight line. Nice stuff.
Birgit:
Sunil would likely enjoy a trip on the Great Lakes. This could encompass The Thousand Islands at one extremity, various spits, dunes, promontories, vast waterfalls, wine-besotted islands and Isle Royale at the other.
The last shot contains together a sense of closeup and unlimited distance. Makes for a good dramatic sense. Funny, but it looks as though you photographed over the shoulder of an orangutan. Wasn’t aware that they live in that part of Michigan.
June,
What encouragement! I am attempting to learn to draw compositions of dunes + water. It is wonderful to be outdoors in the early cool morning and draw. But then, coming home and studying perspective in one the 7 books that I bought can be demoralizing. Most of teaching material shows boxes – I hate boxes. Very few of the illustrations show sloping lines and interesting views.
To relax, I am pretending to be a child with no expectations of myself.
Jay,
I have an immense affinity for roots at the top of dunes – roots exposed by the wind blowing away sand.
Birgit:
Gives clear evidence of the energy in the dunes. Is there some way to emphasize the struggle of the plants to stay ahead of the moving sand?
Jay,
Here, seemingly only the tops are reshaped by the wind.
But there is one large dune that had irrepressibly moved ahead over the last ten years, towards northeast. When I visited it after we talked about it last time, I could not take pictures because of a rain storm.
Middle of July, I will be back in the dunes with my camera (sent back for inspection). I will also snap ‘Proportions of the Human Figure’ with a Shona head and decorated with a strand of DNA.
Birgit —
Give over the boxes!!! Kick them away. Refuse to play! Eschew the boxes!!!!!
For years, I fussed about my inability to draw those blasted piles of boxes that every 16 year old art genius could knock out in two seconds.
Somewhere along the way, it became clear to me that linear perspective (the old railroad line/retreating black and white tiles) is but the most minor kind of perspective unless you are doing architecture. And even there, the fudges that the eye gives you are much more “realistic” than the actual mathematical horizon lines etc.
So just draw — and forget the boxes. Leaves are much more fun, as are the layered arrangements of sloping dunes and the grayed out objects in the far distance. Trust me — life is too short to spend it on boxes.
(I’ve never counted the numbers of books I have on perspective — I think I’m afraid to)
Thanks June,
no more man-made objects to draw!!