On Waterscapes

Top: St. Toffee’s Waterscape | Marker (2018)

Middle: Washes in Motion | Watercolour (2020)
Bottom: Peat Moss Bog with Berry | Watercolour (2020) by Christine Sherry

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Motion and light have a relationship with the natural world that excites me.

When a hand is in motion it appears translucent – a beam of light.

Think of the shift of leaves on a branch on a tree towering down on you with its shadows in the summer sun.

There is no way to really measure the movement of a tree – with all its individual parts – always shaking and shivering in different ways. When the magnitude of the natural world plays with motion it defies the human one. It shields us from the light – it ignites and glows in beams as genuine as an electic bulb . When the natural world presents itself in a singular form – the translucence of a flower’s petal – it mimics motion without effort.

But without motion a petal is still oppressed by its lifecycle and its structure in a way that is predictable.

These are the kinds of attractions that leave me fascinated with the study of water in combination with the natural world. Water can blend, it can blur, it can submerge, it can crystallized and solidify.

Water can beat tree after a winter storm – it is one of the only elements that can stop the wind from moving the shivering plant.

Petals drifting on the surface of a body of water are their own kind of flower – set free from predictablity – giving back a freeness in their motion – as are the blades of grass after a morning frost.

Chystalline structures cement the orderly enough living world into it’s own palace of dainty celestial being akin to the freedom of human movement.

Even though the might of a moving branch of leaves is still too hard too trace – the inversion of the freeze frame is amply powerful.