Oct 152010
{click image to view large}
This scene caught my fancy during a morning walk along the lakefront. Suspended on a low rise in front of a broad expanse of park, the feather reminded me of a shop sign which reads “Back Soon”.
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Lumix DMC-FZ40; f/7.1 @ 1/125sec, ISO 250 (handheld);
Focal length: 108mm (600mm EFL)
You have a talent to express yourself in a thread-clean lacy-ness. Hmmm…. I mean that your work is crisp and clear as a crystal lens. Yes, that’s technique as opposed to artistry… but its a technique that allows you to FWAP! open the door to wonder and artistic feeling in ways that many of us just can’t manage. This angel’s feather still adrift upon a grass blade… still hovering… perhaps straining to recovery its memory of flight up there in the golden light. An image of optimism, aspiration, and hope… is so easily entered because, at least, there is so little technique-clutter to resist the FWAP-ING of the door to imagination. Sigh…. Wonder-ful….
Ted, could I enlist you to write the catalog for my first major exhibition?! One can dream… 😀
Thank you very much for your thoughts on this image. They lend a different perspective to one question I’ve been considering recently: At what point does “simple” become “simplistic”?
I don’t have an answer yet, but you suggest one: opening the door.
April,
Like the graphism of your picture. And esp the falling feather that evokes poetically that all the summer birds have gone away from winter.
In French Literature it will be : a beautifull métonymie.
*I just send this eCard to a friend. Thanks.
I discovered that “métonymie” translates to English as “metonymy”, and one definition reads:
“Metonymy is a figure of speech that involves transferring a name from one thing to another on the basis of certain typical kinds of relations: designating the effect with the cause, the whole with a part, the contents with its container. An example would be ‘a sail on the horizon’ for ‘a ship on the horizon’.”
So…this word describes the (visual) association of a feather with a bird, or even a flock of birds! Cool. 🙂
Just such a beautifully simple – not simplistic – image that can evoke so much feeling and so many memories. For me it’s a metaphor not only for “gone south” but also for being left behind.
Micheline, thanks to you, I’ve also learned a new word – both in French and English!