(picture courtesy of http://en.wahooart.com/A55A04/w.nsf/Opra/BRUE-5ZKDP2)
Mountains in Provence: A painting by Paul Cezanne
The shadows blend into each other. Yellow, green and brown reflect off the sunlight that streams through autumn trees. A house sits in the distance. Who lives there? Behind the fields, the hills and sky meet, dark green to light gray. A soft breeze blows from the left, and all the trees bend with the force. The rocks have odd shapes. Some are rough while others are smooth. Triangles and broken pieces of cubes stand out in the shade. They have a dusty orange and pale white hue that reminds me of a fox tail. Maybe a fox hides in there somewhere, waiting to find its next meal. A rabbit hides in the rocks and keeps extremely still in order to stay alive. The fields are organized and geometrical with the fresh greens of strawberries, the yellows of sunflowers, and the browns of cornstalks. Outside the painting, a deer may be standing and wondering why humans require such order. From the clean cut fields to the straight and simple houses, order was etched into everything man made. What does it mean to thrive off of these ways of life? The order must stand for something. The deer could be perfectly content sleeping outside under a tree with uneven amounts of branches and a slightly bent trunk.
As the wind pulls through the bushes like a wave, a hawk lands in its nest while it watches the sun sink under the hills. The animals seem to laugh at the humans, living unorganized lives where the food chain is more important than the picturesque or the philosophical. Nature seems to know a secret painted in the colors, shapes and beings of wildlife who laugh at humanity’s attempt to make sense of their world. From a distance, this scene appears very picturesque. All the grounds are occupied by something. In the background, fields touch the sky. The middle ground is occupied by a house, simple and straight with a shed tinted sky blue and buried in the tall grass. The foreground is made up of trees and rocks, all placed on a hill. These rocks are not quite slanted by exact angles like the farming fields.
A bird would see the squares turn into the wavy lines of hills and a patch of green shaped like a shoe. No water is in the picture, so the deer will stand by a small pond on the other side of the hill. The pond is inhabited by fish, birds and dragonflies that weave above the water and through the cattails that create a hazy, light brown shadow in the reflection of the water. Every now and then, a fish will bob up for water and create a ripple that disturbs the reflection of the house, hill and sky. Chaos in an orderly fashion. A perfect circle stretches the view of any who dare to look in the water. A farmer brushes his horses and feeds them oats while the children run through the grass until their mother calls for dinner. The triangle shaped bell swings in the wind outside the door until it’s time to ring.
When the bell rings, the deer will look up. The hawk will fly away, and the pond will be silent. Maybe a few dragonflies will hop from lily pad to lily pad , but the crickets will start their music and the fish will bob until they sleep. Once night falls, the barn owl will look for a mouse. The fox will curl up in its den, and the rabbit will be safe.
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