Nature as painter

Nature colours or discolours rock, depending on one’s point of view. Sometimes it’s merely time that lends the exposed bits left after every rock fall a different colour, immediately embarking upon continuous colour adjustments everywhere, mostly very slowly.

The elements of nature impact on the elements of chemistry, as rain, wind, temperature and the sun’s rays use salts and what else dissolves in water to play games on exposed stone. These influences and forces have the time for all kinds of imperceptible tint shifts, very different to what a da Vinci or Picasso bring about.

So much time to do nothing much in the moment but transform mountains over time for onlookers of the far future. Painting abstract pictures continuously over the years, centuries and aeons is an event, not an outcome: There is a different outcome, a product at every stage of the eternal incompletion. For nature is alive, always becoming.

Organic matter plays its part. Living organisms like lichens, combined with all the secretions and excretions from animals down to single cell organisms add untold touches, depending on place, time and what is present.

A mountain just like this one can be seen everywhere, or nowhere ever again. Depending on how closely one looks, what observational skills and habits have been built into the observer, there is much to note or little of significance.

Generalisation and noting analogy are human habits of classifying, lumping together what is seen and sensed; so are attentive discrimination and noticing the finest of detail. Nature is both one and endlessly varied. Whether it is totally different to anything ever seen, or reminiscent of other mountains, a mountain kindles old memories and new musings in those honouring it with a visit.

Mountains are formed and deformed by processes partly repeated, so all mountains have brothers and cousins, sometimes several times removed. And all the walks in far-off places or near home, at times long gone or recently, shaped the mind and extend or reduce its ways of perception. Just like the juices slowly seeping over the rocks impact uniquely on their bit of nature.

And then we also forget lots, idealise and warp memories, never knowing what has been lost or how completely.