Watercolors

Watercolors

The surface of a pond serves as a canvas on which nature creates a continually changing painting that mirrors but alters details of the landscape surrounding it.  Beginning in the late winter, just before leaves appear on the trees, the film records the changes in weather, foliage, color, and light as reflected on the water over the course of a year.  Sunlight falls on the leafless woods on a March afternoon and creates unexpected hues in the water; wind ruffles the water, creating abstract op art paintings; ice and snow texture shadows that fall on the surface; and light changes color from bright white of early summer to gold in August to cloudy sky on a rainy October day.  The images provide visual cues from which viewers can imagine their own sound tracks — a music of the sounds of wind and water.

Yet, weather is not the only painter of this picture.  A choice of black–and–white film for a passage of patterns on the ice evokes Chinese ink painting, and distorted reflections of architectural details and views through purposely out–of–focus trees inspire, in the imagination, paintings of what is not shown, but might be.

Technical Information

Completed 2007
Running time approximately 13 minutes
Filmed and finished on 16mm film, in color and black-and-white
Silent
Projection ratio 1:1.33