Floue mais intelligible, nous sommes tous des impressions.
Oil greens laced through lavender sheens, views from a turf-laden shore. Vines waltz through railings, coalescing with their man-made supports. Water and sky, an amalgam for the eye, what is reflection and what is atmosphere? Nymphaeceae circlets, fractal florets, delicate mid-afternoon rays caught in tranquil pools. Nonsense colors at an inch’s glimpse. Odd splotches, ridges and valleys of violet and cyan. Craters of cremé with rivulets of mustard. Separate and clashing. Chaos at the tip of a brush. Polished maple, lanced with horse hair, bound in nickel.
Days spent reading “Order of the Phoenix” under pointed leaves. Vacationing in the north, roaming fields of daisies, mounted Clydesdale. Scrounging for silvered change, Coinstar nickel and diming for a quarter tank. Lavender outside of my workplace, calming aroma in the night over rooftop crises. Clear Caribbean, enveloped, intruding on a coral biome. Spoonfuls of Cool-Whip out of the container, no other food in the fridge. The cover of “Flower Boy“, driving through Dallas, “take me back to November“.
November must have been glorious: Paris, circa 1840. New eyes born to an unimaginative planet, born to a race fixed on defined lines. “Je n’aime pas, Oscar“, they must have touted. Maybe it’s because you created something beautiful out of the ordinary. Maybe it was because it forces us to identify with nature. Maybe it was that you meticulously globbed, dotted, and lacquered chaos into blurred beauty. Maybe your recordings of the seasons reminded them that their time was passing too quickly as they sat under their parasols drinking Cabernet. Maybe it struck them with fear and concern when they subconsciously realized you painted empathy, that you painted humanity through nature and oil. Hazy, colors bleeding into each other, I know that I’m Giverny, France 1906. A bunch of splotches, independent from the next, caressing their neighbor, solid and fluid. Sometimes memories run into the next, sometimes a smell, sometimes a color, all evoking specific emotion. A gorgeous fog clinging to a set point of existence.
I’m fighting to keep my existence this undefined. Like the scales of a Lepidopteran, fine, iridescent, each one important and part of a whole. Consistently reminded that bold lines are even bolder when they’re trying to draw you into a silhouette, and eventually a mold. Categorizing, organizing, ranking, assigning value, regardless of if the value is understood or not. Consistently fighting my hypocrisy of “I want to be more than one thing, but you have to be one thing to me“, pushing through life creating my own heartbreak and disappointment. Loyalty with no strings attached.
Let colors bleed into others. Stay confused and changing and be honest about it. Humans only act like they’re defined because it’s easier to get comfortable in a cage than in the open. We only define because we’re selfish, we only organize because we’re scared, we’re only tied to time because we’re lazy. We only lack direction because we try to only experience one.
Water Lilies float under a Japanese bridge and so do I.
Inspired by:
Oscar-Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” 1914-1926
Tyler, the Creator’s “Flower Boy” 2017
The Mexican Bluewing: Myscelia ethusa
Existential conversations with my siblings
Santa Monica beach: 10:57 pm
Gravity of Groanings 