Orchard

Even though I've done many watercolor sketches and paintings over the years of the peach blossoms just outside the window where our breakfast table is I never can resist doing yet another. We have two trees there now and it's a mini orchard just outside the back door. There is something about them that is the very essence of the newness that spring embodies, pure in pale color and with the buds like tiny pink moons. It is so cold this year that they are slow to open which is nice as one loves to keep them in sight as long as possible. When the grackles come to feed the contrast between the light blossoms and dark rainbows creates quite an unusual pairing.

Beautiful Nature is so ferocious, and to me springtime is when the delicate versus the savage is most evident. A piece of art that so well expressess this dichotomy is of course "Le Sacre du Printemps", and I have myself written about this in poems and journal entries. The burgeoning of renewing life with all the dangers clustering round each new shoot and delicate egg is, to my motherly side, acutely upsetting. We're told how "wise" Nature is- but when the small springtime tragedies occur, it's very hard to accept that.

Interestingly a chickadee- a protective father I'm guessing- flies into the closest tree and attacks itself over and over in the window, making me worry about his head, as we do nowadays with football players. What would he think if we could show him he's only attacking himself? For him to understand it would neccesitate a whole new dimension of chickadee intellect, which makes me philosophical, as with so many of our moral conundrums we are reminded that our real struggle is with ourselves, that strife is an illusion, and so on and so on..... and here mirrored in nature is an illustration of just such a misconception (albeit nature with the aid of the human invention of glass...)

I did do an egg. As a motif I used the herons I just wrote about. They were spectaclar to have here- but they did take all my fish. (Sorry this image is so large- I can't seem to get this website builder to understand scale.)