Passage of Light

Holographic portrait -
the painter, the observer, landscape


By my third viewing, I have been
assimilated - drawn in,
past the foreground's ivory trunks
of tall, high-country eucalypts,
into the haunting hazy distances
of border range, beloved
of the artist and my father.

The landscape has so totally
ingested me that all you see
is pigment, light, alluding
to a geomorphic density,
colluding to suggest
botanic fantasies mind comprehends,
eyes conspire with paint on canvas
to recapture and present.

You don't realise that is me,
between blanched boles
and distant peaks, dissolved into
translucency, shimmer
on scimitar of leaf and sheen
of creek, like wing-dust from a blue
Ulysses butterfly.

The clouds move past me,
shadows in the gallery,
where people gape, and make
inept remarks, and shift uncomfortably,
come in search of certainties,
confronting beauty's nebulae,
sunlight always filtering
through multilayered chlorophyll,
the moon's face drifting like a reverie
in daytime pools, the truthfulness
with which the artist
penetrates identity, the eye that opens
apertures to private shrines,
the aching arm that guides the brush,
inured to all fatigue and pain,
recording milestones of the quest
with joy and quiet intensity.

*

Inspired by William Robinson's "Passage of Light"
paintings and "Creation Landscape -
Fountains of the Earth"