I’m sharing two photos of tiles today. This first one is tiles on a roof. This is a pretty typical roof in South West France. Every one I look at seems beautiful to me. I love these terracotta colours, the shades from dark brown to pale, almost cream. I love the randomness of their placing – you never see a row of one shade, followed by a row of another. It makes me think of diversity and ordered chaos which makes me think of Life – because Life is like this – diversity, variety, uniqueness, difference plus shared features – and an astonishing synthesis, or integration of, order and chaos.
These are old floor tiles. You can see a floor covering like this in many old buildings in France. You see it in churches, castles, mansions, and even some pretty simple country homes. Like the picture of the roof tiles, I love the colours. It’s pretty much the same colour palette in both photos. I also love their ordered chaos, not just in terms of colour, but, physically, each tile isn’t quite “perfect” (as some would call it), and so they say to you “We are made by human hands”. These are not tiles which rattle off a factory production line. That, too, makes them more “alive” for me. But this second photo has another element – light. These little patches of light splashed over the tiles are the polar opposite of shadows but in some way behave in a similar manner. They take this image to another level.
Between them, these are two images evoke some of the most fundamental principles of Life for me.
Heroes Not Zombies 
Leave a Reply