.. why
natural beauty
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.
- Walt Whitman
The stylized images on this page are exemplary of the five galleries grouped within Natural Beauty. Each is worshipful toward the resplendence of Nature: each glories in colour, evokes the essential mysteriousness of life, its design is composed along classical lines, and looking at it should make you feel affirmed, your soul soothed.
Monkey Temple Strays (2019)
Like many other images here, these shots are also a bit old-fashioned - almost Pre-Raphaelite, or perhaps Pictorialist - in their romanticizing bid to move you. There's an attempted alchemy here in the mix of vibrance and grace, which may go a bit far in spots (diabetic viewers, pack insulin).
Fast Eddies Over Stream Bed (2017)
Two poets capture well the wondrous spirit animating anodyne landscapes. "To me," says Walt Whitman, "every hour of the light and dark is a miracle. Every cubic inch of space is a miracle."
In his Three Songs of Praise, a similarly ecstatic e.e. cummings thanks God for "the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes."
Afternoon Meditation at the Buddha's Birthplace (2019)
These nature galleries are hymns of this sort, sung out loud to sublime landscapes, garden life, leaf scapes, light on water, and light on mountains.
Each jubilate Deo doubles as a threnody, too, for the kind of lush, wild beauty that seems today already to be almost a bygone thing.
Vita Brevis (2014)
Rilke closed his Eighth Duino Elegy with a lament that captures the wistful longing with which we now regard luxuriant shots of our mythically unspoiled natural world:
Who has twisted us around like this, so that
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away? Just as, upon
the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops, lingers-,
so we live here, forever taking leave.
Except where otherwise indicated, all text and images on HunterMadsen.com are copyrighted by Hunter Madsen (2022). All rights reserved.