Beauty that’s as fragile and fleeting as nature

TIME is composed of moments, and the moments are captured by art -- but no painting is as compelling as the broad sweep of nature.

We need only look around to be dazzled by the design and colors that stretch before us in a springtime nurtured by rain and energized by the sun.

Time and weather have carved a background for a canvas of such scope that true artists must be frustrated by their inability to reflect the momentary glory of this season, with its amazing contradictions.

But to our delight, they still keep trying, adding to the blends of time and nature the humanity and artifacts that grace our century and the centuries past.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since alternate trips took me to the High Sierra and to Death Valley, giving me a look at California when it was all dressed up for a season that, poet Julian Grenfell wrote, “quivers in the sunny breeze.”

Spring is a time of rebirth, rooted in the forces that drive flowers through granite, turn rolling dunes of sand into gardens and shine the remaining mountain snow into a high and icy gloss.

I’ve lived in California all of my life and have never seen it so adorned with color. Or maybe I had always been just too busy to look. But now as the years lengthen behind me and shorten before me I’m taking the time to consider my surroundings, and I’m logging them into a portfolio of memory.

Consider the mountains. I was driving to Reno to visit family a few long weekends ago and was captivated by a scene that seemed to emerge out of nowhere. It was like rounding a corner and suddenly confronting a canvas of such beauty that you wanted to own it.

The pass over Donner Summit was dressed with a snow so white that it gleamed. The sky was as blue as heaven, and the mountain trees wore greenery that, as Grenfell wrote, quivered in ambient breezes that swept through the pass.

I stopped to look because one knows instinctively that although the combinations of weather that form such vistas will form them again, they are never quite the same. It was the moment of time that filled this particular space on this particular day, the grand work of artistry almost beyond our comprehension.

In Reno, we stopped by the city’s new art museum at a time it was featuring works from the collection of Steve and Elaine Wynn. In one small room we were surrounded by Van Gogh, Monet, Rembrandt, Renoir, Picasso and Pissarro, embracing us in the moments they captured as time rushed by them.

It struck me as I stood in awe before the paintings, like a child pondering the immensity of the ocean, that here was a piece of eternity, and the thought stayed with me as I confronted the mountains and then, a weekend later, the desert.

My trips are fueled by an energy equaling the power of the sun and possessed in the person of my wife, the glowing Cinelli. Left on my own, I would stay home and write something, anything, because I’m like that duck of perpetual motion, dipping its head endlessly into water. I dip my fingers endlessly toward the keyboard.

A volunteer at the Getty and the L.A. County Museum of Art, she is lured by sudden displays of nature that in themselves constitute art of a passing genre. The wildflowers of Death Valley beckoned to her like the music of Bali Hai, calling her to the desert where, wearing the colors of a prom night, the sandy terrain bloomed in chromatic elegance.

There were fields of gold that swept to the distance, past sand dunes, salt flats and dry lake beds toward the hard darkness of the Amargosa Range, a terrain that seemed of monstrous height because of its sudden, precipitous rise from the floor of one of the lowest places on Earth.

Driving out of Shoshone on 178, we were absorbed into a landscape that, even without the flowers of a century, was impressive. The passage of time marked the land, etching the mountains, searing the earth, moving the sand. The winds of a million summers carved patterns across the scope of the desert and into the dips and crevices. And on the endless plains, bloomed the wildflowers.

Photographs don’t do them justice, nor would any painting, even by a master. This is no wasteland on the arid soil but a glory of golds and reds, purples and greens that were called to the sun by the winter rains for just this moment, this second, this faint tick of a cosmic clock.

They may even be gone by now, the fragile blossoms of the phacelia and the lilies, the lupine and the asters, burned away by the same solar energy that gave them life. They called to be looked at quickly and then committed to memory, until the combined forces of nature once more lured them from dormancy.

I was pleased to be a part of that moment that was here, and now is gone.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.