Water

“Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, sometimes acid and sometimes
bitter, sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin, sometimes it is seen bringing
hurt or pestilence, sometime health-giving, sometimes poisonous. It suffers
change into as many natures as are the different places through which it passes.
And as the mirror changes with the color of its subject, so it alters with the nature
of the place, becoming noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salty,
incarnadined, mournful, raging, angry, red, yellow, green, black, blue, greasy, fat
or slim. Sometimes it starts a conflagration, sometimes it extinguishes one; is
warm and is cold, carries away or sets down, hollows out or builds up, tears or
establishes, fills or empties, raises itself or burrows down, speeds or is still; is the
cause at times of life or death, or increase or privation, nourishes at times and at
others does the contrary; at times has a tang, at times is without savor, sometimes
submerging the valleys with great floods. In time and with water, everything
changes.” Leonardo da Vinci

I like to sit near the water’s edge and gaze for hours, watching shadows of trees and
bridges turning into birds and disappear. I can see the image of my body multiply with
undulation and I can see my reflection on every bubble. On the surface of the water the
trees join with the buildings, with the people walking down the trails, and the reflections
intersect with the sky as one single amalgamation. Water seems like time, quick and fast
moving in parts within the slower, longer waves of flow, turbulent in some places and
almost still in others. The shadows and light constantly shift, joining and moving together
without completion.

I have been watching the waters in the river and recording its unpredictable patterns. As I
have returned to the same location on the river week after week, different shapes
continuously emerge, blend, and grow into other forms, and the patterns of light and
shadow dance and play on the surface of the water. The movement is different each time,
changed by volume, the wind, and the rocks that lie beneath. As an observer I can get lost
in its recurring patterns, motion, and its constant breaking of symmetry. Although
difficult, I like to trail a wave but it quickly joins with other waves like a passing
memory. In a still photograph a wave appears to be a complete form, but in the presence
of time, it unfolds much like a repeating fraction. I imagine Leonard da Vinci watching
water whirling in an eddy, studying the motions of current, gazing and lost in its flow,
and I wonder what he would have done with a camera.

Over the last eighteen months I have spent countless hours intimately gazing at the water
through the lens of my video camera. I have observed and captured over seventy-six
unique undulating rhythms and patterns of the water’s flow. All the recordings are
continuous shots of various lengths. Some forms exist only for seconds on the screen,
while others move for nearly thirty minutes. The recordings are slowed down in time and
all are viewed in high contrast, in the absence of color. The subtraction of information
has allowed for a clearer observation of movement and the play between light and
shadow. The various documentations and the systematic approach have unveiled an everchanging
complexity of forms and patterns, as limitless as the water itself.

“I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by
and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and
then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced
around each other. Eventually the water joined the river, and there was only one
of us. I believe it was the river. As the heat mirages on the river in front of me
danced with and through each other, I could feel patterns from my own life
joining with them.” Norman Maclean, 1976