Impressions and Impressionism

Today is a beautiful, colorful day. The colors are not just the kind that you see, but also the kind that you hear, smell, feel on your skin, and feel in your heart.
The neighbor’s cat keeping me company on the porch is a rich, deep brown, like dark chocolate, thick velvet, and warm shadows.
The tulip tree across the street wears blossoms of living porcelain, pure white touched with mauve, delicate and graceful.
The once-bare branches of trees are bursting with green buds, vibrant life springing forth, while crew-cut lawns sport freckles of dandelions.
The mountains stand out starkly against the clear sky, their crags revealed by the spring thaw. They resemble giant doughnuts or bundt cakes, with snow dripping like icing down their sides and into crevices. Mt. Baker is all angles, reminding me of the blocks of chalk that I used as a gymnast, breaking them apart into snowy chunks, and then grinding them to dust to spread on my hands before beginning an uneven bar routine. These mountains sail in the sky on the horizon, while islands and sailboats fly in the sea.
Yellow is in the tulips and dandelions, daffodils and forsythia, and in the brightness of this sunny day. Orange like muted, living flame grows in one of the shrubs that borders my yard, while purple, magenta, and red bloom in the faces of many flowers.
Best of all is the blue, stretching brightly overhead, streaked with airy clouds, the shadowed blue of distant forested hills, and the silver-faced surface of the water spreading out before me, cheerfully mirroring the sky.
People are like that water, I think, when they reflect the things they surround themselves with, their circumstances, their attitudes and opinions. Some are bright blue only when the sky is blue, but some can call it from a source deep below or beyond the surface, even when gray clouds cover the sky and wind tosses the water into white-capped waves.
Colors are a vital part of such impressions, I think, for they have power to move the mind and the emotions, to wake a sleepy soul from hibernation, to cause me to write such observations and comparisons. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an experience must be worth millions, if one hopes to capture all the details.
This is where Impressionism -the art form- comes in, and can be valuable, although it depends on the artist. It seems to me that Impressionism does not seek to recreate an exact likeness of the subject it represents, because the artist prefers to give more emphasis to the emotions felt or the interplay of light, shadow, color, mood, or atmosphere than to complete definition. One can still understand what the subject of the art is, because structure and form have not been thrown out the window, those foundations have just been stretched a bit and given an additional dimension. For example, my two favorite such Impressionists (although they did not much like the term and did not apply it to themselves) are Monet, who painted his gardens at Giverny, Parliament buildings at sunset, people on a picnic, and so forth with emphasis on the colors defining the forms, and Debussy, who colored a soundscape with tones, depicting such things as sails with the blending of tonal structures and painting with a piano, pitches running into each other like water-colors to create an atmospheric composition. They were not photographing a subject, but rather remembering it and responding to it “out loud” as it were, by giving something back to the world to share how they had experienced whatever it was.
An impression can be loosely defined (my paraphrase) as an experience that presses into someone and leaves a mark; the thoughts, emotions, and actions resulting from the experience are the “mark,” the impression. Usually these are fleeting, for the moment passes and the mark fades, just as the colors of today will fade into night, and the happiness brought by the sunshine will soon become memory on a cloudy day. But those deep impressions made on each person throughout life, those events and experiences that leave a lasting mark, the kind that cause one to give something back to the world -whether ugly, beautiful, or mediocre- I believe they shape the inner person in ways that will either bend one into twisted sculpture, stamped by the ugliness in the world, or turn one into a collage of colors, a mosaic of beauty, or a sea that reflects blue sky even when the world is gray. Free will and choice have a great deal to do with that shaping process, but that is a topic for another day. These, however, have been my simple impressions for today, which now I share with you.
What impressions have shaped your soul?