Weekly Quick Collage: Landscape I

Landscape I

collage, 4 x 6.75 inches

In honor of Earth Day (yesterday), I thought I would post a landscape. Making a collage in a landscape format seems like it would be fairly simple, but for me it was not. I struggled to find a balance of semi-realistic and abstract elements; I wanted it to read as a collage, but with an abstract twist. This is definitely going to take more practice; I modified this piece several times, until I felt it was as close to my vision as I was likely to get. I'm sure more will follow, as I will tackle this subject again in the future.

I will leave you with some of Wendell Berry's lines to inspire you for Earth Day:

 “The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
― Wendell Berry, The selected Poems of Wendell Berry

“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
― Wendell Berry

Earth Day

Kinneyconnick

This place is sacred to me; a place of peace and beauty. Profound connection with the Earth is an experience for which there are no words, because it is beyond thought- it's in our very blood and bones. Walt Whitman tries to express this truth in his poem "Song of the Rolling Earth", excerpted here.



A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,
Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground
and sea,
They are in the air, they are in you.



Air, soil, water, fire-those are words,
I myself am a word with them-my qualities interpenetrate with
theirs-my name is nothing to them,
Though it were told in the three thousand languages, what would
air, soil, water, fire, know of my name?



Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid and
liquid,
You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,
For none more than you are the present and the past,
For none more than you is immortality.



I swear I begin to see little or nothing in audible words,
All merges toward the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the
earth,
Toward him who sings the songs of the body and of the truths of the
earth,
Toward him who makes the dictionaries of words that print cannot
touch.

Earth Day

So much has been said about Earth Day, and I am just one voice amongst the world of YouTube, CNN, etc. So all i will say is this:


Enough has been said. DO something.

Every day should be Earth Day

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS CLEAN COAL