! Spring Afternoon

A spring morning – well, I only need to say the words? I’ll picture mine, you picture yours – champagne bubbling in the blood and in the mind, hopes and possibilities flooding freshly in.. but a spring mid-afternoon… like today, like now: a subtle balance of the elements; the sunlight bathes the room, but gently, with its promise; yet, there’s a timeless peace with it that’s like a life surveyed; yet free of thought, of comparison, or of regret: the six loved paintings that adorn the walls bought for a song, when art was like a song – they love the gentle sunlight, and it in turn loves them; five artists painting their sunlit peace, their happiness; (two very different ones from the man who lives so humbly halfway up the mountain hills he rambles every day): three oils; one gouache; one watercolour; and one pastel; they all but two have clouds in them as they’re all landscapes; one that hasn’t, has a haze as if the painter’s painting the summer wind, in those high hills.. the other is a cloudless morning’s peace, the bend of a river in mid-France; the river…it cannot be, just painted oil? it’s water seen as by a pure clear soul… and the clouds – caught in an impossibility of time, play out an endless drama of the elements; timeless in the peace of, now, a slightly later springtime afternoon; almost with a touch... but how could perfection ever regret its own departure?