Water H20

The very substance of life, the universal solvent of chemical reactions & possibly the most important substance in the Universe. It's who we are and without it, there is no life, not as we know it anyway. Just desert. Water is collected and stored in plants and animals allowing complex chemical reactions to occur.

"Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water and nobody knows what it is." D H Lawrence

Molecules

Water is often visualised as a bent, v-shaped molecule. Two hydrogen atoms holding hands with an oxygen atom in the middle. When many of these molecules come together as in a raindrop, the hydrogen bonds slip in an eternal dance with each other around the heavier oxygen atom making water so very slippery and wet.

Building Blocks

After oxygen (which water is partly made up of) & which we need to metabolise energy, (we get from sunlight via plants & or animals), we need water to facilitate the many complex chemical reactions our lives depend on. So we have to be thankful to generations of stars for making up the unlimited gallons of oxygen and hydrogen in their very hearts, to be released into the cosmos when they died, billions of years ago, so we could live and know that fact. (that's the meaning of life, right there in a glass of water).

The heart of Stars

Incredible to think that our very being was cooked at unimaginable temperatures in the void of deep space and can be as refreshing as that very still, (philosophically important & cool), glass of iced water on a summers day, or as comforting as that hot bath after a cold trek in snow, in the middle of winter where freezing fog has got right into your bones, which are slightly less water than the rest of us is. No wonder we like tea and coffee so much. We are basically not much more than tea with sugar and milk (bones) ourselves. (fat protein sugar water = human)

Rainbows

Water's way of showing us the true glory of light in all it's (visible) colours. All energy is just a frequency of light.. microwaves, gamma rays, radio waves. We just can't see them. Everything that isn't light that's powered by it is just water with a bit of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, with a very delicate sprinkling of metal. Simple

Solid - Liquid - Gas

Water plays an important part in my work. It's so very versatile and creates beauty wherever it travels, always with the path of least resistance until it settles, waiting for the sun to return it to the sky in an eternal dance of evaporation and condensation. The following collection brings together water in all of it's glorious forms, from droplets to ice crystals, steam and the glassy stillness of a perfect reflection. Water bounces light in a way that almost nothing else does and for that reason I dedicate this post to the rain.

• Moss Flowers Condense Raindrops (can you see the house?)

• Waves break the shores of the Red Sea in Egypt

• A well camouflaged marine creature in a rather untidy rock pool. Conwy, North Wales

• Raindrops forming concentric circles in water, the ripple; a perfect metaphor for the repercussions of our actions.

• An entire ecosystem; a world in a jar cultured for viewing with the microscope

• Miniature ice crystals form morning frost along the top of the wall. The white dusting revealed in close up

• A rare double rainbow, water's incredible refractive properties in vapour form showing us the almost miraculous colours of sunlight in all it's seemingly impossibly true and pure colours

• Fallen leaves float just underneath the surface along the lakes edge in Sefton Park, Liverpool like pre-raphaelite figures

• The drinking fountain at the junction of the path in London Fields caught mid flow like a glassy lava

• Afternoon dewdrops condense forming perfect spherical droplets at the junctions of crossed silk threads in a spiders web

• A downy feather falls into water with leaves but has not quite broken the miniscus (surface tension) yet

• At Diagonal in Barcelona a flash shower provides one more city to add to my reflections series

• The last dewdrop of the morning clings to a blade of glass like a world of it's own before sunlight evaporates it back up into the atmosphere where it will condense yet again somewhere else bringing life with it wherever it is trapped