I have not always been an artist in practice. I have probably always been someone who is very comfortable out of doors and a person who comes alive when the senses are challenged to expand. I remember specifically scenes from Bertolucci, a stairwell, a combination of partitions of different texture, when I realized that my eyes and the sum of my art experience behind my eyes were changing so many of the images I faced into abstract expressionist stills. The progression of horizons, shading away into haze. The waves of grasses blown across surging fields. That short period when the cloud-crossed eastern sky holds the most extravagant dawn colors. The planes of focus, looking on a stream.
Scanning for birds from the places we go to find them puts me right where I want to be, a soaring church where the soul is an active player in awareness, not a word on the page or a sound from the lips. The senses reach further out and one is feeling less like self and more part of everything sensed. It is good religion, without shapes added to the essential experience. A meditation not from emptiness, but from fullness. Those two are likely more similar than not.
The expansiveness of awareness is good shared. It may be exquisite alone. There is more space to let outside things come in.
Less attention to when this begins and that ends. We are so incredibly fortunate to be able to decide when to leave the beach. Blessed are we for such choices.
I carpentered. I painted. Now I photograph. I wish there was the room and the appetite to do all three.
My Avian Art wants to seduce into an image powerful enough that a sense of the very personal is there, the fleeting but striking moment. The man taking the picture; the bird; the person looking at the image framed on the wall. Like so much art it’s about connecting. My way offers an invite to be there, to follow the trail of the connection, to feel the connectivity beyond the image and the moment, to respect and on to a responsibility coming from innate spirit more than culture.
