CMP Review 2023-07-20

July 20, 2023

Nature is not like the cinema. A good movie captures your attention, compels your senses, and choreographs your emotions. Nature does not thrust its delights upon you; it is so much more discrete. In fact, sometimes it camouflages them.

Only upon close inspection did the flower reveal its secret. It was hosting a visitor as hidden from the admirer as from the predator. The little bug’s colors so perfectly matched the petals that it seemed the Artist had painted them from the same palette on the same day. Only the motion perhaps gave him away. But I had to gaze long enough to see.

I fixed my eye until I could remember the pattern on his back, then sat on a nearby log and tried to draw what I had seen. The value was perhaps less in the painting than in the knowing that I would paint. That too compelled me to see.

Nature is not like the cinema. A good movie promises excitement without effort and emotion without engagement. Nature promises something so different. Wordsworth described it well: “A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm that nature breathes among the hills and groves.” A little bug breathed on me, and peace was my reward.

@artmiddlekauff