Texture

My daughter Brenna in a hay field in May. This is a detail from a larger image.

In my earliest memory I am running on the lawn in front of our house that overlooks Lake Erie. That is all. It must be August because I hear a loud drone in a nearby tree. As a child I believe it is an electrical sound coming from the transformer box behind the row of poplars. Not until later will I learn it is a cicada's call. Beneath the shade of maples and birches, the grass is soft and cool. But at the end of the yard, along the top of an eroded bluff overlooking the beach, the soil is sandy, dry and bleached by the sun. The grass there feels coarse and prickly under my toddler soles. Textures, sensations of sight, touch and sound, create the fabric of my earliest perceptions.

Texture is one of the classic elements of design, along with line, shape, colour, value and space. An artist or photographer must consider the importance of texture in every image. An artist relies on his medium, materials and movements; the strokes of pen or brush. A photographer must find structure in her subject matter.

It is also a tool of the nonvisual artist. A poet creates word textures. A prose writer uses patterns of action, dialogue and descriptive passages to develop a structure that will lead the reader through the story. Music is made of sound textures.

And sound itself, such as the drone of a cicada, is a texture, called sound waves, made from air particles.

The universe is full of textures. The largest one scientists have found is measured in hundreds of millions of light years, giant superclusters made up of hundreds of thousands of galaxies. The galaxies themselves are massively intricate, containing billions of stars.

The Universe Within 1 Billion Light Years gives a visual presentation of the largest structures of the universe.

Ferns in a stream bed.

On the terrestrial scale we find another layer of textures: the crystalline structure of rocks and the countless forms of living things. Visit Bill's Plaice for a gallery which displays the textural diversity of plants.

It carries down to the cellular and molecular levels, more and more textures captured by the eyes and feelers of our most sensitive instruments. MicroAngela's Electron Microscope Image Gallery presents some spectacular photomicrographs.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic