Vintage Art Appreciation: Path from Loschwitz to Rochwitz by Gustav Otto Müller

Path from Loschwitz to Rochwitz, 1896
by Gustav Otto Müller (1827-1922)

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don’t want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you’re doing here. Believe in kissing.
― Eve Ensler

Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

My Photo Journal: October Lake at Twilight

O night, O sweetest time, though black of hue,
with peace you force all the restless work to end;
those who exalt you see and understand,
and he is sound of mind who honours you.
You cut the thread of tired thoughts, for so
you offer calm in your moist shade; you send
to this low sphere the dreams where we ascend
up to the highest, where I long to go.
Shadow of death that brings to quiet close
all miseries that plague the heart and soul,
for those in pain the last and best of cures;
you heal the flesh of its infirmities,
dry and our tears and shut away our toil,
and free the good from wrath and fretting cares.
― Michelangelo Buonarroti, Complete Poems and Selected Letters

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden,
a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it.
You and you alone make me feel that I am alive.
Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.
― George Edward Moore

Soft, dusky twilight by the shores of Lake Ontario in October.
© FieldandGarden.com. All rights reserved.

Vintage Garden Illustration for collage Art, Graphic Design, Papercrafts or Scrapbooking: The Gardener, 1889

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies,” my grandfather said.
A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made.
Or a garden planted.
Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die,
and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

“It doesn't matter what you do,” he said, “so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.”
The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener
is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all;
the gardener will be there a lifetime.
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Vintage illustration of a young female gardener from 1889. 4.5 x 6" @ 300 ppi JPEG without a watermark here. Larger image size available for licensing. Please inquire.


From my personal collection of ephemera. These images are to be incorporated into your creative endeavors and not for resale or re-distribution "as-is". Please credit FieldandGarden.com as your source when sharing or publishing.

Vintage Art Appreciation: In the Garden

The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something.
Don’t wait for good things to happen to you.
If you go out and make some good things happen,
you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.
― Barack Obama

This is the real secret of life --
to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.
And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
― Alan Watts
Painting is titled "In the Garden," (?) c1920s by Jindřich Tomec (1863–1928). Originally found on Wikimedia. Digitally enhanced version of the painting as a 11" x 8" @ 300 ppi JPEG here.


Digitally enhanced reproductions of public domain fine art are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.