This Side of Austin

April 13, 2022 Leave a Comment

Venture into the edges of Texas Hill Country, and the bucolic meadow scenes begin to come alive with an endlessly varied painterly and surreal pastoral palette. Blankets of wildflowers increasingly mix in with grasses casting a blush of magenta to an entire hillside, a yellow glow to the next, a deep violet-blue cast to yet another.

This juxtaposition of color across hill and valley is rather unearthly and unique in its beauty, surely impossible to fully capture on film. As I navigated these back roads, there was often a distinct feeling that the scenes unfolding before me were not real, but more delicate watercolors or impressionistic paintings, a fine mist of tiny spattered blossoms of oil pigment points resolving to solid color over distance, all the way to the horizon.

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Lazy Longhorn… maybe my favorite photos of the day. Nothing says “Texas” like a longhorn steer lying among bluebonnets.

The challenge, as a photographer, is to accept the limits of the medium’s ability to accurately portray the physical scene of meadows filled with flowers that extend from one’s feet to infinity. Short of virtual reality or wall sized immersive high resolution images, I accept that to capture the actual scene is impossible. So I resign myself to doing my best to capture the feeling, which is really the essence of art anyway.

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Flower Gallery