Rainbow weekend...

Are rainbows like buses, you don't see one for ages and then a whole bunch of them arrive one after the other?

It was a weekend full of rainbows. I could hardly look up without seeing one, over mountains, over roads, over fields – they seemed to be everywhere. Well that isn’t quite true, I saw three over the Saturday and Sunday - all doubles (does that make it six?), all perfect arcs at some point in their fleeting visibility.

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet – it never fails to lift my spirits when I see one. There’s something magical about them, even without that pot of gold at the end, or a leprechaun, or a galloping white golden-horned unicorn.

It's impossible to paint a rainbow well - they either look too chocolate box or simply dull, like flat bridges in the air. Turner couldn't do it (he tried though), nor Constable (although there ought to be one in the Haywain) and Dali didn't even try. And I've never seen a Da Vinci rainbow, or a Titian, or a Degas, or a Bosch, or a Bruegel. Perhaps (masterful catchers of light and shade that they all were) they understood the impossibility of painting that transparency of color and ever shifting movement of luminescence and light. If you know better please tell me, I'd love to see a good painting of a rainbow.

That’s it really – a weekend full of rainbows, nothing special. I thought it worth a mention.

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