The Narrative Image

An Elk, somewhere above The Dalles Dam, but below the John Day Dam, below the stereo and on this side of the Bicentennial glasses, between the ashtray and the thimbles in this three inches that includes the Chiclets, but not the erasers. I had a teacher once (Vicky) who posited with a straight face that the most important thing you can give to starving people is art. Now as then, I still vote for bread, or more specifically, an educational program that teaches sustainable farming and a financial package to help such an endeavor along, but the outlandishness of my teacher's claim haunts me to this day. I wish I could remember the words my teacher used, her normally brash and cool character terrifyingly subverted by the threat of oh-my-god-actual-tears, as she tried to convince us, a handful of her young sculptor's in training, that what she said was true. But I can't. It was thirty years ago or so, and while that may not pose a great problem for gospel writers, it ...

Back in May of 2011, I shared some of the details of my search for Loring site 15. http://thenarrativeimage.blogspot.com/2011/05/sound-of-one-hand-clapping-loring-site.html By Loring site I mean one of the rock art sites documented in J. Malcolm and Louise Loring's two volume monograph called Pictographs and Petroglyphs of the Oregon Country.   In that post, I noted that, " Many of the paintings seem worse for wear when compared to the Loring drawings…to the degree that my identifications are not always certain." Since that trip, D. Russel Micnhimer, of Oregon Rock Art ( http://www.oregonrockart.com/index.html ), has introduced me to a specialized bit of software called DStretch by Jon Harman ( http://www.dstretch.com/ ). As Micnhimer said to me in a Facebook message, " It's the closest thing I know of to absolute magic; (it) will make the invisible appear." So what follows is a series of my pictures from Loring site 15 that ...