There are mornings on Yellowstone Lake when the water is so perfectly still that the reflection is indistinguishable from the thing itself — when the boundary between lake and sky dissolves completely and the viewer is left with a composition so symmetrical and so complete that the eye travels back and forth between the two halves trying to determine which is real and finding, eventually, that the question does not matter because both are equally and entirely present. The Perfect Mirror captures one of those mornings with exceptional completeness and beauty: a massive cumulus cloud building above the dark treeline of the Yellowstone Lake shore, its form so perfectly reflected in the glassy lake surface below that the image reads as two complete skies — one above and one below, each as luminous and as fully realized as the other, the white of the cloud and the blue of the sky repeated with a precision that no painter could have achieved and that the natural world produces only in moments of perfect atmospheric calm. The dark treeline of conifers bisects the composition at the horizontal midpoint with a clean, graphic precision that anchors the symmetry and gives the eye a fixed point from which to measure the extraordinary doubling of sky and cloud above and below. The blue of the sky is deep and fully saturated, the white of the cumulus cloud lit from within by the particular quality of high altitude light that belongs to the Yellowstone plateau — warm and clear and carrying none of the atmospheric haze that softens lowland skies — and the whole image breathes with the particular stillness of a Yellowstone morning when the wind has not yet begun and the lake is keeping its most perfect secret. A natural companion to Prismatic Fire — Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone, Valley of the Bison — Hayden Valley, Yellowstone, and The Lamar Valley Herd — Yellowstone Fine Art Print, The Perfect Mirror stands as the most purely contemplative and compositionally symmetrical image in the Yellowstone collection — a landscape image of exceptional serenity and visual intelligence that will bring stillness to any interior it inhabits. Available as a limited edition of 50 worldwide on ChromaLuxe Metal, Lumachrome HD TruLife Acrylic, or DuraPlaq® FloatPlaqs. Photo © copyright by Tamara Gooch.

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