Illustration Friday - Ghost

Trees in the Garden

Ah in the thunder air
how still the trees are!

And the lime-tree, lovely and tall, every leaf silent
hardly looses even a last breath of perfume.

And the ghostly, creamy coloured little tree of leaves
white, ivory white among the rambling greens
how evanescent, variegated elder, she hesitates on the green grass
as if, in another moment, she would disappear
with all her grace of foam!

And the larch that is only a column, it goes up too tall to see:
and the balsam-pines that are blue with the grey-blue blueness of
things from the sea,
and the young copper beech, its leaves red-rosy at the ends
how still they are together, they stand so still
in the thunder air, all strangers to one another
as the green grass glows upwards, strangers in the silent garden.

-D.H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)

The sky changes so quickly here...from acid blue with the trees glowing neon in the late afternoon light, to grey with huge rushing clouds that stampede fiercely across the hilltops. Autumn is Nature's give and take...She gives so much visual beauty that one can't help but feel an inexplicable joy, but that joy is tempered with a sadness as each rainstorm and gust of wind denudes the trees and brings us closer to winter...when we will join those bare ghosts as they wait for the return of green.

(acrylic on 6" x 8" canvas)