“ As the swimmer depends on water, so the writer depends on language. To swim well, we must let ourselves be enveloped by the water, sink into it, become a part of it. To write well, we must similarly let ourselves be enveloped by the language, sink into it, become a part of it. ”
JOY - Cameron Diaz watching the waves, reconciling on What Happens in Vegas movie.
Joy
Water is a source of endless joys and plays. On a warm sunny day, watch kids having fun in it. They constantly create new ways to enjoy water; they swim, dive and dabble in all kinds of positions, jump to it throwing it all over, hit it with the palm of their hands, have water-battles, squirt it from their mouths. Good mood spreads and stays with them for hours – water refreshes their mind and body.
They feel well.
On a beach, by a lake, sea or river, we are more human, closer to our inner selves. We leave the roles that work and society put on us behind, drop them to the sand, to the rocks. We think more clearly.
The Olympic Games of 2004 in Athens had a spectacular opening ceremony. One of the main actors was water. During the ceremony, the center of the Olympic arena was filled with couple of inches thick layer of water – it was like a huge mirror. In Greek culture, water is a symbol of happiness.
“ Life is like a snowball. The important thing is finding wet snow and a really long hill. ”
Impressionist
Claude Monet lived his childhood in Le Havre, city on the west coast of France, where the Seine river meets the Atlantic Ocean. The place and its nature made him a strong impression, particularly the river which he recalls:
The Seine. I have painted it all my life, at all the hours of the day, at all the times of the year, from Paris to the sea…
His works tell about his inclination to study and paint reality through effects of water: cityscapes are wrapped in the envelope of fog - sky, buildings, boats, lilies are reflections on the surface of water. About London and fog, he said:
I only love London in winter… Without its fog, London would not be a beautiful city.
At the turn of the 19th century, during the later part of his life, he started building a water garden to his studio in Giverny. The Japanese-styled water garden with its lilies and bridges was a motif for several of his paintings, his devotion until the end of his life. In 1908, he admitted:
These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. They are beyond the strength of an old man like me, and yet I still want to succeed in rendering what I experience… I hope that something will come out of my efforts.
[source: Monet, Karin Sagner-Düchting, Taschen]
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.
The Birth of Beauty
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.
