Texture

Artistic: Texture

The artistic inspiration this week is texture. You should almost be able to feel the image.

This one had me befuddled. Texture – it comes from the Latin. It means both writing (text) and weaving (textus from the past participle texere). Every language belongs to a family of proto languages that pre-date the languages that eventually became those spoken on our planet today; Latin belongs to the Proto Indo-European language family and our word ‘texture’ is based in the word teks in that mother tongue – it means to weave, not just fabric, but wicker-work. ‘Teks’ is the proto word that was passed down to the Sanskrit, Old Persian, Latin, Greek, Old Church Slavonic, Lithuanian, Old Irish, Old High German, German, and Hittite languages. Someone in the 1650s used it to mean ‘structural character’.

Today, when we think of texture, we think of ridges, smooth and rough surfaces. However, I found my texture inspiration in a field. Every May the countryside becomes a patchwork of yellow, brown and green. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a tree floating in waves of yellow. It’s Rapeseed season and it is glorious. We stopped driving the other day down in Bedfordshire so that I could take this shot. The warp and weft of the stalks and stems are fluid, so that thousands upon thousands of brilliant yellow petals rustle and float for miles, resembling a sea of silk.

So, there you are, my friends. Texture.