Photo Opportunities

If what I am doing are base collages, I need close up lens to photograph elements.

The wedding collages and painting are striking and honestly the photos provided were just excellent snapshots.

What I work with does not need to be perfect photos - they need to have material I can manipulate.

This morning walking to train I saw the most splendid bright pansies in a storefront pot - dark purple pansies mixed other pansies with pale warm white washed flowers with delicate precise purplish veins. Beautiful in early morning light. Morning light is by far my favorite.

Those pansies were moment's visual delight. Might well be the visual highlight of my day.



My pansies were better than these - much better. Inferior eye candy.

Collages, losses and a song

I have been examining the collages I have made via MS Pant et al. Collage - this is the best description - and I believe my work is valid. Every layperson I have shown them to has made positive comments, other than those few that do not like "modern art."

I need to take the C prints I have made and paint on them - create a portfolio and then shop a minimum of eight to galleries. Size will be 11 by 14, maybe a few smaller.

Finally see the "altered forest" for the trees.

The idea that the images all have to be of one model might seemed necessary until today. Have to develop alternative strategies. Still needs to be tied in - you need a gimmick (bad word). Theme, let's call it.

I wish I were paid to think.

Read an interview by Croatian born actress forced to leave home and career due to civil war. She holds a Buddhist view that "life is a series of losses." Funny, but just when I wrote quote regarding life and losses, a song started on my iPod with snappy refrain that "you can close your eyes and never be alone."

Life is a series of iPod songs, sometimes.

Take advantage of opportunities and accept and appreciate gifts and wonders before they are lost.

Rubens, Sandwiched

The power of the written word.

Commuting

I am constantly looking to locate and decipher hidden beauty - at trees moving in the breeze, at patterns of light and shade, at random colors splattered on a wall or the decaying patterns caused by rust or the element... and of course I gaze at women.

I was on the train last night and there is a reasonably well dressed woman, maybe twenty six, across from me who just bought a new medium sized pocket book. She removed the plastic on the handles and placed her old bag in the shopping bag. It was so innocent and charming to see her examine the bag and the strap and the tag and to see her touch and pat the white leather lightly as if she did not believe she held it, owned it. Like a twelve year old boy with his first BB gun. Then she reached down and re-tied this little brown bow made of ribbon on the side of her pump.

She is somewhat adorable and as I write this I swear I am not trying to patronize her. Instead I witnessed a rare good dash of materialism coupled with innocent fastidiousness - quite refreshing on a late boring commuter train where most people are jaded or tired or beaten.

Quite different from a woman I sometimes sit across from on the morning train. All the times I have sat there she has never made any eye contact. As if I were transparent or a ghost. Very odd. I am not trying to be her friend, but it is hard to sit for fifty minutes at a time and pretend someone is not inches away. Both of us wear iPods.

She is on the train before me and always selects a seat with people facing her. By the time I get on that facing her is one of the few seats left. All odd and not charming.

Cold. I dislike cold people most of the time. So, guess not much to write about.

Rubens, Scratched - No Good, Start Over

Quick study using Peter Paul Rubens painting off Internet - in the end this is plagiarism so will not do again, meaning use a painting. Very cheap. Leaving it here to remind me.

Postscript - problem is left too much of original intact - see image above where Rubens transformed 98.6 percent.

To have loved and lust or to have never lusted at all

Rented and saw movie this weekend - Norwegian love triangle, "Monster Thursday." Man is in love with married woman and affection rekindled by close association. At one point when appears clear that the infatuation is hopeless she tells him that he will recover. He responds that he cannot - that it is not like the flu. She then states in response that it is like the flu.

Is love like the flu? A virus, sometimes? I wish I knew. If love where like the flu so many people would love a yearly vaccine. And maybe some develop their fortunate or unfortunate resistance or immunity.

Or is it dependant on the carrier - maybe for some it is like the flu or they can shave it off like a beard or change hair color...whatever is convenient. There is this less than catchy song by Stephen Stills that proclaims "if you cannot be with the one you love, love the one you're with." I never bought the single or the album, nor the sentiment. I was always a romantic.

This actress is quite striking.



It is not better "to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all." It is far better to have lusted and won.

21 Years - Shaven Off

Around May 1986 I started to grow a beard - shaved it of this morning - well, a barber did it.

Look like a different person - very odd to look in the mirror.

Not sure what I expected, but I almost did it a few months ago, but lost my nerve.

Naked to the world and now I need to shave every morning....