lighting on the printless verdure (and at a great distance all appear alike)

and at a great distance all appear alike. the sea, however, is said to be blue one day and green another without any perceptible change in the atmosphere. some consider blue 'to be the colour of pure water'...


lying between the heavens it partakes the colour of both...


some have referred this to the reflection of the verdure; and it may be simply the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of sand.


... or because there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a time, being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, i have discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself...
...
yet a single glass of its water held up to light is as colourless as an equal quantity of air.
henry david thoreau - the ponds

images - r.p. leitch - a course of water colour painting - londres - 1883

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the light of the sun or the moon, seen in a place from which they are invisible and one cannot discern the source of the light; a place only partly illuminated by such light; the reflection of such light, and the various material effects derived from it; the penetration of such light into places where it becomes uncertain and obstructed, and is not easily made out, as through a cane brake, in a wood, through half closed shutters, etc., etc., the same light in a place, object, etc., where it does not enter and strike directly, reflected and diffused by some other place or object, etc., where does it strike; in a passageway seen from inside or outside, places where the light mingles, etc., etc., with the shadows, as under a portico, in a high overhanging loggia, among rocks and gullies, in a valley, on hills seen from the shady side so that their crests are gilded; the reflection produced, for example, by a coloured pane of glass on those objects on which the rays passing through that glass are reflected; all those objects, in a word, that by means of various materials and minimal circumstances come to our sight, hearing, etc., in a way that is uncertain, indistinct, imperfect, incomplete, or out of the ordinary.
giacomo leopardi - zibaldoni

images - aaron e. penley - the english school of painting in water colours: its theory and practice. with the several stages of progression - 1861

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leaf rubbing & leaf imprint

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froebelian drawings - perforated paper in the form of a leaf

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...the more vague and imprecise language is, the more poetic it becomes...
italian is the only language in which the word vago (vague) also means "lovely, attractive." starting out from the original meaning of "wandering", the word vago still carries an idea of movement and mutability, which in italian is associated both with uncertainty and indefiniteness and with gracefulness and pleasure.
italo calvino - exactitude from six memos for the next millenium

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(for patrick farmer and sarah hughes the wonderful beings behind compost & height, who very much inspired the leopardi and calvino, and quite possibly the thoreau *)

((all images from the book la infancia de las vanguardias - cátedra - 2007))