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The Little Island
There is a little island not far from here that has always held a powerful attraction to me. Hardly more than a rock with a beacon at one end, it is in the path of all the ferry traffic travelling to and from the mainland. Its dominant sound is the crash of ferry waves, the thunder of engines and the squawk of public address systems.
In spite of all this disturbance it is a most beautiful land in miniature, like a painting of some idealized Renaissance landscape tantalizingly glimpsed in the distance behind some luxurious nude: Sandstone slopes and diminutive cliffs are topped by a grassy meadow and several rounded evergreen trees. That is the fascination with islands, there is a satisfying sense of completeness, of natural boundaries, that is so hard to find in our human, complex world.
In this drawing as in the Renaissance Painting, the human element, the ferry waves,fill the foreground while the Island fades in the near distance, already at the fringes of human interest. How many among the thousands of ferry passengers each day who rise to depart at the prompting of the loudspeaker, will pause to spare a glance at that perfect beauty they are passing by?
There is a little island not far from here that has always held a powerful attraction to me. Hardly more than a rock with a beacon at one end, it is in the path of all the ferry traffic travelling to and from the mainland. Its dominant sound is the crash of ferry waves, the thunder of engines and the squawk of public address systems.
In spite of all this disturbance it is a most beautiful land in miniature, like a painting of some idealized Renaissance landscape tantalizingly glimpsed in the distance behind some luxurious nude: Sandstone slopes and diminutive cliffs are topped by a grassy meadow and several rounded evergreen trees. That is the fascination with islands, there is a satisfying sense of completeness, of natural boundaries, that is so hard to find in our human, complex world.
In this drawing as in the Renaissance Painting, the human element, the ferry waves,fill the foreground while the Island fades in the near distance, already at the fringes of human interest. How many among the thousands of ferry passengers each day who rise to depart at the prompting of the loudspeaker, will pause to spare a glance at that perfect beauty they are passing by?
1 comment:
Thank you for sharing your self and your art with us all Bill ~ it's so beautifully done, and it doesn't surprise me at all that you've marched right in and made this weird medium your own (or maybe pillaged and burned?) Really inspiring and soulful my friend...
Joanne
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