A lot of art takes place out of doors. Here, for example, is a lovely spring ritual that can colour up even the windiest day:

Springtime Apple Heave Ho

Spartans and Granny Smiths make it to the compost bin at last. 

In these spontaneously combusting art works, colour and balance bloom musically. Time is another ingredient of the palette. It shows up in the various degrees of rot and the story of one year’s dreams leading eventually back to the sioil. Time also shows up like this:

Gate, Swing Set, Abandoned Road and Deer Trail

 Note the new road cut into the hillside in the background. The gate doesn’t open. Deer go under it. Humans go over. The swing doesn’t swing.

It really does look like art is a part of this planet. Maybe what we’re doing in our galleries is a human way of being part of that.

Orchard in Bloom by  Ingrid Winkler at Kelowna’s Hambleton Galleries

This, too, is a conversation with time — just with a particularly mammalian look to it. In this case, textures quote textures and the distance between the image and the valley brings the valley close. For humans.

The same time gap exists in natural images. Cats hunt by memorizing two acres of ground, then paying attention to the disturbance of even a single blade of grass, where a mouse passed by. Could it be that humans do much the same by reacting to very tiny changes in time signatures or rates of time flow? Maybe. Here’s an image from Iceland:

House in the East Fjords

 Winter flowing right through the summer. Or is that summer blowing over winter like the wind? At any rate, humans live at the intersections of these time flows.

Is it that the world reacts to these changes, too, and perhaps with great clarity?

Barbed Wire in Noble Canyon

Sifting hoarfrost out of the air.

Speaking of the sun blowing over us in fire…

The Winds off the Sun Lifting the Snow Away Coldstream Ranch

Notice the mixed palette of the human artwork in the foreground.

Could it be that we are standing absolutely still?

Tomorrow: What that might mean for creating a sustainable human culture, right here, right now.