Spring picture
There’s a feeling of zest in a balmy spring day that you don’t get at any other time of the year.
The crows are crowing, the robins are rounding up bits of string and twigs, the farmer is making clinking noises around his tractor and the tom cat is off making sexy, baritone overtures to the female living a mile down the road.
Plants and trees are budding and a brown butterfly with gold-tipped wings is flitting about.
As the grass greens up, I hearken back to a theme that I’ve reiterated so many times my friends are getting tired of it.
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The question I want answered is this:
Why haven’t Prairie artists and photographers discovered that spring is the most beautiful season on these western plains?
Go to any art gallery and you will see dozens, nay hundreds of paintings and photographs of swaths and combines.
You’ll even find stooks and threshing machines and nostalgic scenes of the family homemaker bringing lunch to the harvest crew.
But where are the fields of lilies and golden beans, of brown and black-eyed susans?
Where are the saskatoon, pincherry and chokecherry bushes with their pristine white blooms?
Where are the new calves and colts bouncing around for the sheer fun of it in the pasture?
I suppose a harvest scene is a story of expectations realized but I like the seeding season when everyone is optimistic.
The birds are cheeply optimistic, the gophers are squeakily optimistic, the cows bawl more cheerily and there’s no negativism even in the horse’s neigh.
The greening of this Prairie land is a time of vigorous new life. What could make a more heart-warming painting or photograph than that?
