That light and the memory of it: to glide along without friction in the warm spring air and take in that peculiar beauty shining all about is to find yourself suddenly in a higher order of landscapes, a place made more real and more present through the congruence of your solitude and its primeval majesty that demands no more than your awareness and of which you ask only that you be allowed to move slowly through it without intrusion or interruption.
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
Everywhere the surface was changing, crumbling to dust, washing away … Gradients of color, broken edges quickly softened. Never straight lines, only gravity pulling water on paths of least resistance.
This ice cream is small reflection of the glowing, balmy restorative days; a distillation of the bright coolness, the sharp scent of new green growth, and the creamy sweetness of perfect air.
So what remains after you lose everything? When water or fire or clumsiness or meanness or a pandemic or cancer or war or ignorance and obsolescence changes everything–breaks everything, what do we do with what remains? We make art.
There is a pause, a thick electric hush, as we wait for the thunder. But in the yard the white-throated sparrow, seemingly unphased, sings and sings his wild and melancholy song.
Basil is a “remedie for malancholicke people,” the scent of it good for the heart and head, and will make a man merry and glad. Anyone who has harvested fresh basil on a summer’s day can attest to the truth of this!
Gabriela Dombille’s thought-provoking Preserve Collection asks questions about our relationship to nature and about our often-deadly fascination with the mechanics of beauty and of life itself.
So I am content to draw, each drawing a provocation, another layer in an ongoing process of poking and prodding at notions of place and landscape and in that sense I am content to let things drift.
There’s so much in life that we can’t capture in words or pictures: everything is shifting, changing, and with more hues, values and shades than our eyes can see, more notes than our ears can hear, more subtleties than our hearts can feel or our minds define. But I love that we still try.
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