Today about midday I headed out with my camera to take in some color on my own street. I don’t live on a traditional street, I live on a CR – a County Road. It’s a four-mile stretch of unpaved road that weaves it’s way up to the top of Pine Mountain outside of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. I’ve been watching the leaves change day by day – but leaving for work in the early morning and returning at dusk has given me few opportunities to capture the color during the week.
.
As I looked up today I was reminded of a professor I studied painting under in college. Rita Abbey – she was always talking about transparencies – layers of colors over other colors…
Layers that allowed you to see other colors through them. Although I saw her technique as something more graphic and abstract at the time, today I believe I saw it in nature…
Yellow hickories, backed up by red maples, layered over orange sassafras…
All of it looking so translucent over a perfectly clear Indian Summer sky…
In school I saw Rita’s technique as a way to make us dissect space and interpret it in a new way, and maybe it was…
But today I saw something beyond technique or exercise, I saw nature layered in a way that made solids look translucent. Light and shadow creating shapes superimposed over the surfaces of the leaves…
Today I saw a work of art as I looked up into the sky. All I had to do was to capture it inside a rectangle.
the eff stop 