victor

Look above, to the cold lonely blue or the infinite black………… lower the eyes and see colour, form, and movement, the shapes of our living surface. Being surface creatures we observe the landscape mostly edge on, and as it recedes into the distance, our world seems to be an infinite place, yet the images of our planet from earth orbit, the moon, and recently as a blue speck from Saturn, show a small, beautiful and apparently untouched world.
One of the many pleasures of flying a light aircraft is the ability to observe and appreciate the most extraordinary and intriguing planet in the solar system, close enough for local detail, but from a high and free roving view, extraordinary because of the endless variety of images this world produces, in comparison to the craters, deserts, ice flows and acid cloud tops of the other worlds in the solar system. Intriguing, because this is still the only world with enough variety to engage the mind for a lifetime, and more.
An aeroplane on the ground is a fine piece of machinery, but in the air its aluminium body and steel motor take on life. It ceases to be a separate machine to be guided and controlled, becoming instead an extension of the pilot’s own muscles, nerves and sinews, following your eye and carrying out the mind’s wishes, bestowing the ability to travel with the winds, through and above the clouds, over cities, forests and mountains, then to swoop down and admire in finer detail creation’s beauty, and not through computer generated images via sensory interfaces, but in pastel coloured, muscle straining, wind-on-the-cheek reality.
From above, our world shows a clearer aspect. Spread out like an endless textured tapestry, the earth provides an amazing diversity of images constantly changing with the varying angle of the sun and the fluctuating moods of the weather and seasons. In a picture rich environment, when the subject matter is in a state of flux, such as with moving subjects, or the rapidly changing light of scurrying winter cloud shadows and during those few precious minutes of golden light at sunrise and sunset, when the movement of the planet can be seen, one is almost overwhelmed by the choices of compositions available. Time takes on a physical presence, harmonising with the space that contains it, its effects visible. How the mountains folded out of the earth’s crust, the rolling wet clouds, the places where water gathers and flows through the undulating contours of the land, the wind and weather scoured surface, the seasonal ebb and flow of vegetation.
Towns and cities rise in the more enticing areas of the landscape, the rich plains, valleys and more sheltered contours of the coast.
Below, the fields are being worked, farmers are creating loose designs on the crops with their harvesters and balers, mown hay lies in free formed lines, ellipses and circles. Hay stooks, like frozen fire set in a rich brown fabric, catch the first rays of a rising sun.
When the summer winds blow from the hot belly of the interior, they sometimes carry fire in their breath, smudging large swathes of farmland black and twisting forests into crazy abstracts of ash white, charcoal black, and scorched orange. Vast landscapes of beautiful, crisp desolation.
With the still air of autumn, a golden glowing haze hangs light over the quiet, patterned land. Smoke from foresters’ or farmers’ burn-offs rises vertically for thousands of feet before lazily drifting off in higher altitude breezes. Below, the land is a stable warm grey, crops have been harvested, fields lie fallow, pasture reduced to stubble, livestock fed from the backs of trucks, leaving swathes of casually scattered feed. Many lakes are just a memory, dry white crusts sometimes broken by hurtling black lines, speeding youth in fast cars and motorbikes. Creeks and rivers are reduced to a trickle, their beds lined by trees left dry. Sunsets are long, large and red, the burnished western horizon slowly swallowed by a descending liquid night of infinite azure, sprinkled with the first of the brightest stars and planets. The parched landscape softly glows even after light has ceased to caress its surface, as though still radiating the stored energy of the long summer days past, warm and even .
As the seasons change, the cold winds bring the heavy, ragged sheets of wet winter clouds brushing the tops of mountains, turning the land green and scattering the low ground with sparkling pools and rivulets, and creating a new and beautiful world above, an arena of luminous white and brilliant blue with slashes of metallic pink and gold at sunrise and sunset. A whole new eyescape, its form, untouchable, governed not by solids but by yielding air and vaporous water, moving and moulding, flowing through unscaleable time and space like waves in a dreaming mind, abstracts becoming reality.
In the wetter seasons, sheets of shallow water cover the flat wetlands, enveloping plains and forests in a shimmering liquid, creating muted water colour hues, swirling, blending and softly reflecting the same sky that brought it there.
With the icy blackness of the long and still late winter nights, the atmospheric moisture solidifies and settles, gripping the land in a white stillness only sun break will release, its piercing white light flooding the frosted ghostly landscape, slowly bringing back the lost tones and colours of seasons past and the
promise of the coming spring.
The first ripples of warm turbulence herald the end of the grey slumber of winter, bringing longer clearer days and warm drying breezes. The land breaks out into colour and pattern, fields of vibrant yellow on green, agriculture renewing.
Spring brings water birds to the large shallow lakes, vast clouds of life in motion covering the many islets in a white confetti which, on approach….... softly… explodes into a living white storm, tens of thousands of birds moving as one, casting a vibrant speckled shadow on the sparkling blue/green shallow waters. Shadow and light competing in an ephemeral dance of sweet motion, a visual whisper across a liquid surface,.......... look away and its gone, dissolved into its own environment. Larger long necked water birds skim low with a sweeping fluid grace, movements folded into movement, order melding out of chaos.
Looking down on the fragile veneer of life that envelopes the planet, and having seen the lifeless panoramas of other worlds one realises that this life zone between the top soil and cloud tops is all we have for now.
Vision helps us realise our isolated lonely place in the universe, and our own earths beauty, diversity, and fragility.