The Celery Fields in Fog 8 (My Mona Lisa)
January 3, 2018
Your indulgence is begged for this one; the conceit may be a bit of a stretch. I recently finished reading (actually, listening to an audiobook of) Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci, and my mind was still reeling from what I learned when I saw this tree through my viewfinder. One of the things I found out from the book was that Leonardo was the first painter to depict backgrounds as bluer and less distinct than foregrounds. The fog at the Celery Fields helped give me the bluer and fuzzier background to the leafless tree (with spider web) in the foreground. Thus, my Mona Lisa.
Romancing Reality 
I love the influence of your reading on your photography, especially the reference to this being your “Mona Lisa”.
The spider’s web is as mysterious as Mona Lisa’s smile. Lovely.
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January 3, 2018 at 8:45 AM
Thanks, Clare. I’m glad this wasn’t too over-the-top for you!
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January 3, 2018 at 9:31 AM
I’m enjoying the very different perspectives of the celery fields you’ve been posting Linda. Leonardo, no doubt, would have felt the same.
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January 3, 2018 at 2:52 PM
Isaacson’s book is really good. He gives you a feeling for who the man must have been, not just what he did. Thank you for channelling him in my behalf. I’m glad you have been enjoying these. A few more to go.
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January 3, 2018 at 3:51 PM
I’ve missed so much, being away….and I think this is way, way cool, that you learned such an interesting fact (I had no idea) and then applied it and shared it. That’s heaven to me. And yes, this is a strongly foreground/background image, isn’t it? So it’s a good example, I would imagine, of the principle.
I can’t see the whole frame on my screen; it’s too tall. Maybe there’s a trick I don’t’ know. Yeah, I think there are lots of those….anyway, I like this a lot, and the spiderweb is lovely. Clare’s remark about the web and the smile is wonderful.
I haven’t read a biography in a while but I enjoy them sometimes. I was deeply moved in much younger years by one about Rembrandt. On a different note, a series of 3 autobiographical books by sculptor Anne Truitt is a great read.
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January 12, 2018 at 9:31 PM
I’ve been trying to make these verticals smaller. It used to just happen if I told WordPress to show them large rather than full size, but now that isn’t working. If you click on the image, you get the attachment page, which is a bit smaller. Hope I get this figured out. It bothered me in my post of today (January 14), too.
I read Truitt’s Daybook some years ago, but never really got into it. Maybe I didn’t even finish reading it. I see that it is an audiobook narrated by the author, and maybe that would reach me better, but it’s not available on Overdrive, and I’m reluctant to buy it. I can’t get the other two books in the series even on paper in my libraries, either. I’ll bet one of my friends has them, though. I will check.
I hope you enjoy the da Vinci book as much as I did.
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January 14, 2018 at 12:39 PM
(I put the Da Vinci book on my Amazon wish list).
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January 12, 2018 at 9:37 PM