VISIONS OF ART, DESIGN AND FASHION
A nonstop showing of beauty at the beach
“Come forth into the light of things, let Nature be your teacher.” — William Wordsworth (“The Tables Turned; An Evening Scene on the Same Subject”)
All along the Gulf side edges of our island home can be found continuous front-row seating for what is THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH—performance art on a cosmic scale (something even the dearly departed Ringling Bros./Barnum & Bailey Circus could not top). It is presented daily in three acts and an afterglow: sunrise, daytime, sunset and night. The last one is often overlooked because of limited lighting, but those who show up on the beach after sundown can take in a vibrant, flowing, threedimensional video presentation.
The celestial curved screen above holds a divided sky that reveals the marriage of cool, black, deep darkness with the warm, white burning of starlight. Scattered tastefully across the heavens, these pulsating power-points flood an infinite universe with energy. Closer to home the colorful planets in our solar system bask in the glow of nearby “old Sol,” whose starshine lights the lamp of the moon, which circles our pretty blue earth.
Artist Salvador Dali claimed, “To gaze is to think!” Taking time to observe this lightshow stirs wonder—not just about WHAT is going on and HOW it works, but WHY it is there in the first place and whether or not there could be a WHO responsible for designing the whole process. This marvelous play of form and color reflects order.
Albert Einstein exercised his genius in the attempt to understand the mysteries of reality and consciousness. He used the sophisticated tools of science and math to start unraveling the tangled threads of energy, mass, space and time. Surprisingly, that first step in loosening this cosmic knot was elegant in its simplicity: watching how light moves and clocking its speed as a universal constant. Although he was an agnostic with regard to organized religion, he affirmed that “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility … The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle”—a statement that implies the possibility of there being an ultimate DESIGNER. Later, musing philosophically, he added, “Art is the expression of the profoundest thoughts in the simplest way.”
Simplicity seems to be a dominant trend these days in fashion design—especially on the beach. The current style began in 1946 when the famous fashion editor Diana Vreeland was sunbathing in Saint-Tropez, France. She spotted a young woman wearing little more than two triangle cutouts. On learning that the sexy suit was called a bikini, Vreeland announced that she had discovered “the most important thing since the atom bomb.” The “swoonsuit,” as she labeled it, revealed “everything about a girl except her mother’s maiden name.” A year later she caused international outrage by featuring a bikini-clad model on the May c over of Harper’s
Bazaar. This tiny piece of fashion took over permanently when women’s beach volleyball turned professional in 1986.
So, after reading this edition of TOTI (which is focused on matters of art, design and fashion), be sure to make your way to the beach and enjoy the show—night and day.
Ran Niehoff and his wife, Marilyn, have been beachgoing on Sanibel and Captiva since 1991.