The Narrative Image

Wind racing over the waters Careening around canyon corners Ice cold waves leap with delight ...Idiot kayaker, not so much High desert mountains Try on a flimsy spring dress of sheer green Teasing again Blooming flowers witness  The grass being whipped Trembles in the shredding wind Curious clouds Sniff alien contrails As they scurry by  I don't think flowers Often experience existential dread But you never know  Before the gale Flickering like bright yellow Daylight fireflies  In a symphony of windblown grass There's no telling which baton Belongs to the conductor There's those flowers again Acting all happy And shit Shy plants looking back and away All the time nodding consent to nothing in particular  Surveying the dead and wounded At the end of the grass battle In memory of those Who dared to show their faces to the sun Hey flowers! Suck it! ...

Got a few days off... but the weather pointedly asked me just how much fun can you really have in a tent by yourself when it's raining? So I headed East into the Cascade range rain-shadow, searching for sunshine...all the while keeping my eyes open for 'thin places'. Two different metaphors presented themselves: * Interstate freeway system as circulatory system (with the health of various 'organs' dependent on circulation/traffic * The route from Portland into rural Oregon as time travel into the recent past I found the first metaphor rather pleasing as my trusty (said with heavy irony) corpuscle/vehicle coursed through various arteries and veins to the peculiar arrhythmias of commerce (once I factored in the Columbia River). But wind turbines and the price of gasoline were jarring reminders that small towns were definitely not  nostalgic oases in time. Still, I very much enjoy road trips, if for no other reason than to find the perfect heat-lamp b...

Back a few weeks when snow paralyzed a significant portion of Portland, a spare contingent of Portland Art Museum staff managed to open the facility’s doors on time and kept it running until reinforcements managed to straggle in. Their heroic efforts afforded me an opportunity to take in the WILD BEAUTY photo exhibition in relative solitude. http://www.northwestphotography.org/WildBeauty.htm I’d been working at establishing a relationship with the gorge over the past couple of years… oh screw it. …maybe it would be more accurate to say that, like some shallow, materialistic paparazzi, I’d been stalking the gorge with my camera, hoping to capture an intimate or private moment (say maybe a nipple slip) so it was an unexpected bonanza to find myself peeking into the equivalent of a childhood photo album. The thing is, the pictures were really beautiful, and seemed to become more beautiful as it became evident how difficult the early art of photography was to practice, but the unspoke...

I’ve been visiting an interesting web site called Art & Perception. If you visit, you’ll find a community of artists who share their personal journeys toward understanding what it might mean to make/share/express art. This is accomplished through the regular posting of articles that have to do with various pursuits in the fields of drawing, painting and photography. What makes it a pleasure to visit is that while you could hardly gather together a more disparate group of people and viewpoints, they all seem to be genuinely supportive of each other and their accumulated wisdom and experience makes for some very useful suggestions and encouraging comments. One article that captured my attention was called Breaking Up is Hard to Do http://www.artandperception.com/2007/08/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do.html which dealt with making ‘Cubist-like multi-perspective’ images. I had just spent some time in The Dalles, hiking in an alien landscape of tinder dry grasses and basalt outcroppings. Som...