DEFOCUS - It was slightly raining when I took this picture of a lake. Camera did not know where to focus, and the picture turned out blurry, looking like an oil painting.
Who paints like this, I thought, someone certainly has these kinds of paintings with water as subject matter. Off to the library, I went. Browsing through the arts section, I found out the painter: he’s Claude Monet, the French impressionist.
Water possesses a deep understanding of beauty. Its different forms, motions, shapes and surface structures construct the sense - the measure - of beauty to us. Intuitively and subconsciously, we compare everything we see against that measure.
Metre is a measure of length. It became a standard after a series of international conferences in the 1870s. The original prototype bar for one metre was constructed in France from an alloy of platinum and iridium, and is still kept and conserved there.
The original prototype of beauty is in water’s properties and attributes. It is kept in the waves of an ocean, in the reflections of a raindrop, in the dendrites of a snowflake. We were born to it.
Beauty originates from water, like the goddess Venus. In the painting of French painter Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825 – 1905) waves give birth to her, the goddess of love and beauty. The same subject is also made famous by Italian painter Sandro Botticelli around 1486, and French artist Alexandre Cabanel in 1863. Venus is the Roman name for goddess Aphrodite. A Greek myth describes how she was conceived from a semen mixed with sea foam, how tides and winds bought her to Cyprus and how she was raised from the sea by Graces, her handmaidens.
One way to interpret the several paintings depicting the birth of Venus is this: water is source of beauty. If an object has some of water’s properties, it is considered beautiful. Diamonds and crystals are considered beautiful because they look like frozen water.
THINK PURE - Artesian water company Voss’ serene advertisement. Occasionally, the company’s products are stuck in customs for further investigation. “This cannot be water - it must be vodka or something”, customs officers think. “Who would buy bottled water with this high price tag?”
WATER DRESS - The model Gisele Bündchen wearing a splash dress in a Brazilian advertising campaign. Lesson once more learned: beauty and water go hand in hand - water knows beauty.
HOLE IN THE LAKE - On a summer cottage - me toying with the camera - I asked my son to hit the surface of the lake with a boat oar. After a few tries, the photo above was captured.
The photos of moving water have a tendency to surprise; quite often they present something unforeseen in the shapes and reflections. Without exception, they have an aspect of beauty in them.
