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ART OF THE ORDINARY
Private Notes
Private Notes
Notes
Art Of The Ordinary
Age 24, Durham County, North Carolina, 1969
(I arrived at this idea at age 24, but the poem is written from my perspective at a much older age.)
-- This is one poem, in an autobiographical series of poems, I posted here at WriteSpike. Go to my stories section for others. They are in chronological order. --
All three of these photographs are by me, Rick Doble.
The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
~ Marcel Proust ~
Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows.
~ Claude Monet ~
What I see is ordinary
my wife two rooms away
swishing a string
above the cat
as he jumps in the air
while the outside light
from the glass door
outlines them in silhouette
on the side of the road
I see weeds in bloom
the redness of broomsedge in mist
and
rain on my windshield
when I drive over a bridge
soft twilight fades
from gold to blue,
white houses taking on
the colors of the light
I am tired of
the exotic, the elite
the hard to understand -
art should be immediate
simple and direct
a heightened moment
snatched from
the play of light
the play of movement
the play of work
nothing unusual
except to show
how extraordinary
it is to live from day to day
Comments
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Beautiful descriptions about light! I love the picture with the trees. I tend to gravitate toward old trees and paint them often with varying light and colors behind them.
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My favorite expression of art is the beauty you can find in ordinary moments.
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And as the quote from Proust points out, the hard part is to see things in a new way.
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Really like the message of this one. Especially that closing line: "to live day by day."
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Thanks Alexander: A friend at college used to point out that the quality of the day was important to each person.
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Miranda: Photography is really the art of light -- which is often forgotten. It is the action of light on a light-sensitive material. So it works very well with the emotional intensity of light in different moods.