This post starts on Friday looking out from Bugzy on the Rhine. Come with me in thought, I didn’t include the barges and the luxury cruesships, but I did see a large number of swans on the far sand bank.
I was concerned that they were not upending as they do when feeding but I couldn’t see their heads and necks. I found out they were dabbling. They were sifting through the vegetation using their serrated edged bills their necks not visible.
It was after watching the swans and the river that I wanted to take time with one of my photographs of Stolzenfels Castle. I wanted to look with my pen in my hand. A pen makes mistakes and I wanted to see them, as I appreciated the perspective realised by the architect and photographed by me.
So I did just that:
The photograph is skewed to the right.
My pen lost the arch meetings on the right and so it may have, but I enjoyed the fight for perspective.
Leonardo da Vinci ‘ whispered’:
‘The divisions of perspective are three, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminuition and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.’
And John Constable said more loudly:
I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, – light, shades, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
I then looked at a photograph of flowers in the spotted cup without an ear. I picked them some time ago when we started our journey.
Here is the sketch with black pen and then the painting. The elder flower stalks are hidden they are in a pottery cup, the flower stems are as if in a clear cup. My perspective.
‘ Humour is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everday affairs.’
Christopher Morley.
So here they both are. These two while sitting by the Rhine.
My pen sketch. A cup with white flowers.
The dabbling swans. They have their second eyelids that act as goggles so that they can see exactly what they are doing under water.
My painting . A cup of Elder flowers and two wild flowers.
The dabbling swans and my dabble with art. All three with gratitude for being able to see/ look.
Gratitude is one of the strongest and most transformative states of being. It shifts perspective from lack to abundance and allows you to focus on the good in your life, which in turn pulls more goodness into your reality.
Jen Sincero
This was our scene, the wire is where Bugzy must not go beyond. A privilege to be so close.
Isaiah says: ‘ The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to those who are weary: He wakes me up morning by morning, he wakes up my ears to hear and I am not rebellious I listen.’
What a fine relationship between Isaiah and God. Wouldn’t you like that, too? I would. (Isaiah 50:4,5 the way Sandy reads it.)
Take care,
Sandy 🙂