Sunday evening miscellany

The last time I took the train to Munich, every other field was yellow: the rapeseed had just come into bloom. I found it, as always, striking. The colour is so intense, so richly saturated. A rapeseed field has a kind of texture to its surface, each plant produces many separate small flowers which stand apart from the stalk on short stems, allowing you to see through the mass of blooms into the dark green interior. A wheat field has no interior, the heads are so compact and close together, that you cannot see below them.

I saw a painting of a rapeseed field by Ralph Fleck at the Art Cologne show a few years ago, which I still lust after; he captured the intense colour and the textured-surface effect very well. Rainer Fetting has also made a few rapeseed field paintings. It occurred to me to wonder why I had never seen this depicted in pre-modern art. Think how many paintings of wheat fields, corn fields, hop gardens, vegetable gardens there are. Why did (to take but one example) that great observer of nature and dedicated painter of all things yellow, Vincent van Gogh, never paint a rapeseed field in bloom?

Is the attraction, the strange beauty, of these fields a modern affectation? Or was rapeseed perhaps not planted on a large scale before the invention of the mechanical harvester? (Or are there hundreds of old paintings of rapeseed fields that I just haven't noticed?)

Ducklings

There are relatively few ducklings this year. Many apparent pairs seem not to have bred, and those that did have hatched fewer eggs. The typical brood is around four or five; there have been other years when it was as high as ten ducklings per pair.

Convertible

I rode back from Iffezheim with G in his convertible, a marvellous experience. I didn't realize that one could hear - and smell - the outside world while driving in a convertible. His car is of the kind that would be called a Carrera were it a Porsche: front and rear windscreens are fixed, and the middle part of the roof lifts out, so you sit surrounded by glass on four sides but open to the sky, in a bubble of relatively still air. It wasn't even particularly loud: We could converse almost normally at 150 Kmh. I could hear birds in the forest as we drove past, and smell the ripening crops. Very nice; but one does get dusty and very thirsty after a while.