Day 17 – A Watercolorist’s Journal
Painting a hummingbird is an exercise in slow motion. A whirring reel clipped to a single frame. Let loose a spill of inky blue for the fast-flapping wings. Your brain knowns the details there are unseeable. It will not protest. Save the fine tip of your brush for the feathered blue-green belly, radial starburst halo of the staring eye. There lies motionlessness, the part suspended beneath the drum-beaten air. There the circle of stillness, shared with a blossoming branch, calm eye of the storm from which all else is thrown. A sort of fleeting symmetry is at work here, centripetal and centrifugal forces tugging at the eye. And there, at the not-quite-center of it all, a tiny staring face, as surprised to see us in this frozen moment as we must be to be seen.