Thinking about today's world, we need to experience peace and beauty to soothe our souls. Take us away from tales of the madman in The White House. Take us away from images of the obliteration of Gaza. Push news about Sudan and Ukraine into the background. Blank out personal worries closer to home about health and family and money. Yes beauty can be a kind of medicine. Healing, sedating, a prism.
And so in the vast Google library I sought a picture that would speak of beauty. I came up with the one shown above. It is in the Saatchi collection and it's called "Old But Beautiful". It was created by J.S. Ellington who is a resident of Abilene, Texas. She was born in 1948 and worked as a pharmacist for thirty seven years before pursuing her real passion - painting.
Of "Old But Beautiful" she said this, "The landscape features an old barn I have painted before from different angles and in different seasons. I am so attached to these old structures. I imagine that one was made by the hands of the rancher that owned the land long ago, but it has remained standing, no longer useful but beautiful. I hope the viewer will feel a sense of solitude and peace and will be lost in reverie about a time when there was more activity and life around this old structure."
Abandoned and tumbledown buildings also inspire me as many of my past photographs have shown. Such buildings speak exquisitely, beautifully, silently of those who went before and the lives they lived there.
Okay, so that's visual beauty but what about aural beauty?
When I was sixteen or seventeen, I heard an album by Vashti Bunyan. She was an almost legendary hippy figure who travelled to a commune on Scotland's west coast aboard a gipsy caravan pulled by a horse. Along the way, she wrote the simple songs that would later form her first album.
The title track was "Just Another Diamond Day". It is a short and simple song that speaks of innocence. You can almost hear the horse trotting and the caravan's wheels trundling along. Back then in 1970 I thought it was such a pleasant song - disconnected from mainstream music. In fact, I suppose that I longed to be riding in that caravan with Vashti, strumming my guitar or holding the horse's reins as a rainbow arced above the hills.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/BQ2RJrs
