laramie

It's beautiful: cool, sunshine, green world. The trees are nearly all full leafed, thick with fresh green leaves and deep shadows, stirring in continual calm motion. They can make me forget the rest of the scene: with the passing cars and their noise, all the sleeping houses sheltering under the boughs. That was near home. Downtown there's less in the way of greenery, but there are a couple small parks between the bus stop and the office: the one on the south side of the Government Center with its circle of lawn and birch trees, the one in front of the Accenture building (that used to be the Anderson Consulting Building); on each corner are stands of slim multi-boled trees with bark like auburn satin, and wide lawns and flower beds. My eyes seek out these things and slide away from the busy streets and sidewalks, the buildings of cement and glass and steel.

Maybe it's only in the heart of a city that simple trees and grass appear as rare treasures, and ordinary deer seem as miraculous as unicorns. It's been too long since I've been out camping, or spent any amount of time where the brambles and mosquitoes are plentiful. That's when indoor plumbing becomes the rare treasure and electric power the miracle.

I was thinking about something fredcritter wrote yesterday, about the arts, and "What to reveal. What to hide. What to allude to. How. When." And about sleigh quoting his art teacher saying, "The most important thing in your painting is what you leave out." Something about the last statement bugged me. Maybe just its sweeping nature. The practice of an art is certainly a selective process. In sculpting stone it's subtractive, in sculpting with clay it's additive. You need to know what to add or what to take away, but in either case there's something else that determines those choices: a sense of what's fitting, what's appropriate, what works toward the ultimate effect of the effort. If anything is 'The Most Important' thing in a work of art, I'd say it's that sense of the ultimate effect, the sense that an accomplished work conveys of having an identity in and of itself. The Story. The Song. The Vision. Whatever contributes to that belongs, whatever doesn't contribute doesn't belong.