Zeus, a god of Greek Mythology, was father to nine daughters. The sisters were each an inspirational creative power, or Muse, for one of the fine arts. I don't know what Terpsichore, the Muse of dance, thinks about hip hop or modern dance, but if joy matters, her beatific, animating influence is apparent and on delight infused display as our daughter and her friends perform at Pine Manor College's Ellsworth Hall.
As I recently researched the names of the other sisters and the arts which they champion, I was crestfallen to not find a muse for painting or sculpture. There is a theory that the ancient Greeks deemed these pursuits common, inferior, and perhaps coarse. I'll try to remember that alleged tidbit of arcane Greek hubris the next time my husband and I take advantage of Maine's Portland Museum of Art's free Friday evenings. The Greeks of legend never breathed the bracing air of an autumn in Maine, so I excuse this lapse in Olympian judgment.
As the fervent sun hugs the horizon in the late afternoon of early October, as if the coming winter solstice would deny further close embrace, I savour the lightsome scarlets, lustrous bronzes, and burnished oranges of the mottled, but still partially clothed trees of my backyard and street. Oh, Museless painter, eyes and hands kissed of God, perhaps you are most blessed of artists; to wield the chroma of a single, veiny, light resplendent leaf from saturated brush to absorbing canvas, is creation rendered anew.
Radiant, back lit trees expose lithesome limbs, their elegant, stretching strength as pleadingly delicate as the extended arms of a prima ballerina's dying swan. The bones of the tree, as the carriage of a dancer, are framed and magnified by the rustling of their translucent, tinted garb.
The black form of a lone crow zips across a Mother Mary blue sky. The deep, solid hues of bird and firmament are surreal, almost to beautiful for eyes to abide or heart to brook. A waning, post autumnal equinox afternoon cuts a capricious swath of light and shadow across our home, the lawn, and a copse of variegated greens that ripple and sway, rise and fall, wave and flutter in an iridescent, deciduous Hallelujah.
Here in our quarter acre a languorous sun contrasts the peridot sparkle of leafy copse with the sapphire glimmered sky, alit with the waxy sheen of a child's newly opened paint box. The conifers, somber sentries, stand shadowed; these, the enduring, unchanging backstage hands to fall's sumptuous ballet, offer wafting, drifting needles in reverent and hushed humility.
In this brief season of brittle, dropping leaf, stark November seems to peer greedily from behind sun drenched cloud, as if impatient for a turn at play. Pulse and purpose are embodied in the glimmering, carnelian orange of the sugar maple. Hope is emergent, rekindled, ember-like in the flaming, gem of October orange.
Indeed the garnets and ruby reds of silver and red maple or red and scarlet oaks; the topaz and citrine of birch, elm, beech and poplar, most resemble the jewel like panes of the stained glass windows of a house of worship. The canvas of autumn's artist needs no muse. His brushstrokes are the rarefied air of renewal, rebirth and resurrection. No Muse can fully capture them, no winter's icy breath can hinder their envigorating, energizing, transcendent promise. The twinkling glory of an autumn day is that spring will surely come. Come spring.
As I recently researched the names of the other sisters and the arts which they champion, I was crestfallen to not find a muse for painting or sculpture. There is a theory that the ancient Greeks deemed these pursuits common, inferior, and perhaps coarse. I'll try to remember that alleged tidbit of arcane Greek hubris the next time my husband and I take advantage of Maine's Portland Museum of Art's free Friday evenings. The Greeks of legend never breathed the bracing air of an autumn in Maine, so I excuse this lapse in Olympian judgment.
As the fervent sun hugs the horizon in the late afternoon of early October, as if the coming winter solstice would deny further close embrace, I savour the lightsome scarlets, lustrous bronzes, and burnished oranges of the mottled, but still partially clothed trees of my backyard and street. Oh, Museless painter, eyes and hands kissed of God, perhaps you are most blessed of artists; to wield the chroma of a single, veiny, light resplendent leaf from saturated brush to absorbing canvas, is creation rendered anew.
Radiant, back lit trees expose lithesome limbs, their elegant, stretching strength as pleadingly delicate as the extended arms of a prima ballerina's dying swan. The bones of the tree, as the carriage of a dancer, are framed and magnified by the rustling of their translucent, tinted garb.
The black form of a lone crow zips across a Mother Mary blue sky. The deep, solid hues of bird and firmament are surreal, almost to beautiful for eyes to abide or heart to brook. A waning, post autumnal equinox afternoon cuts a capricious swath of light and shadow across our home, the lawn, and a copse of variegated greens that ripple and sway, rise and fall, wave and flutter in an iridescent, deciduous Hallelujah.
Here in our quarter acre a languorous sun contrasts the peridot sparkle of leafy copse with the sapphire glimmered sky, alit with the waxy sheen of a child's newly opened paint box. The conifers, somber sentries, stand shadowed; these, the enduring, unchanging backstage hands to fall's sumptuous ballet, offer wafting, drifting needles in reverent and hushed humility.
In this brief season of brittle, dropping leaf, stark November seems to peer greedily from behind sun drenched cloud, as if impatient for a turn at play. Pulse and purpose are embodied in the glimmering, carnelian orange of the sugar maple. Hope is emergent, rekindled, ember-like in the flaming, gem of October orange.
Indeed the garnets and ruby reds of silver and red maple or red and scarlet oaks; the topaz and citrine of birch, elm, beech and poplar, most resemble the jewel like panes of the stained glass windows of a house of worship. The canvas of autumn's artist needs no muse. His brushstrokes are the rarefied air of renewal, rebirth and resurrection. No Muse can fully capture them, no winter's icy breath can hinder their envigorating, energizing, transcendent promise. The twinkling glory of an autumn day is that spring will surely come. Come spring.
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