Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Something very sublime is happening here....




There are little land plants beginning a life at sea... however one of those little tufts holds a secret... it is the nest of a kingfisher.  This is a very unusual place for a kingfisher to nest... I think perhaps the top of the pole has rotted out and there must be a little cavern... kingfishers usually nest in holes in the cliffs.  I hope they return this year.


There is a place further down the coast where they have been nesting for many years in the remains of an ancient tree... the branch were they sit and observe the bay is polished hard and smooth by generations of movements of little bird feet.



Resistance... the form of this shore is a horizon within time of the interaction between elemental forces  ... it is not the smooth horizon line of the distant sea but a conceptual horizon of a moment of time.


The forms here are the forms of the imperatives of natural power... even when the beach is still the power of the ocean still effects you through what remains of the waves in the stones.

Thursday, March 26, 2009


I have a fascination with sea caves...



The moment you move into a sea cave there is a definitive shift... the everyday harmony and proportion of the senses is revised. The light is dim... the cave is dank and dripping. The air is suspended heavy around you... you become very aware of your skin... sound does not travel in a familiar way... you can taste the ocean as you breathe. Looking in... the usual horizon lines are not there but perspective is amplified sharp.


These caves are formed by the power of the ocean and qualities of this force are made visible by the existence of the caves. Other forces are made visible to us... the interior formations also manifest the form and power of resistance.



Monday, March 23, 2009


Once there were doors to a spirit world here... and people would move through them to other ways of being...


Friday, March 20, 2009

It was once the belief here that humans had two souls... the landscape was teeming with supernatural powers and places... spirits dwelt in all things.... the lives of the creatures were sacred and souls of beings wove their paths back and forth between  worlds.  Ravens were gods...





I know it is difficult to see this image of Raven... the gods nailed to a board.  This is a somber and disturbing image for the first day of Spring... but look closer there are little blossoms and soon the raven heads will be obscured by the life of the peach tree... life goes on.


Life goes on for the ravens also... I live here among them... when I first came here they were very curious about me and they would walk around on my deck and jump up to look into the windows... I assume to see what I was doing. They have a complex language and I believe they have named me... whenever they are close by and I come out of my house there is a particular phrase they repeat every time.  


Three days ago they began collecting sticks... relaying them to their nesting site... soon there will be new ravens. 


I believe that we have as a culture become deeply separated from the things we need the most... the beauty and spirit of natural world... for myself I try to be vigilant in my reconnection to the nature of this place ...especially considering that we as beings may now be  down to one soul.


Thursday, March 19, 2009


Not only do we seek to manifest patterns of understanding on the natural world but we also impose aspects of ourselves... we have been doing this since the caves... but not always in the obvious way...



Sculptors that do portraits in clay must be mindful that they do not blend their own image within that of their subject... as humans we touch our faces and forms thousands of times each day ...a chimera of our own form resides in our hands and it is transposed outward in unexpected ways.


Think of Venus in the stones in my photographs... she is only there because I told you she was there by naming her.  Also, by naming her in a certain way you were able to approach my experience...  at that time I was not experiencing rock walls and sea caves... I was deeply in grief... so I saw my sorrow.


The resonance between form and meaning it tightly wound in our primitive mind and it will manifest itself in wondrous ways...




Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Seacave Venus...





Monday, March 16, 2009



Beach Venus with fractured heart....



Sunday, March 15, 2009

ORACLE

I certainly did not assume that residing in the wild beauty of this place I would be able to approach an unmediated experience of nature and elemental chaos... but I did assume that  I could explore photographically the relationship between the self and the primal landscape and how that landscape resides in consciousness. I believed that the landscape was itself a way of seeing and that the cameras while complicating that experience could provide a visual fulcrum with which to shift the axis of my perceptions.



Very early on this little beauty appeared... it is an oracle... those little stones are actually words... and she definitely has something mythological on her mind.




BEACH ME

I lived in Italy for a time before I came here... that was over a decade ago...



I adore Italian culture... but life in Venice was an intensely mediated experience.


Acres of gilding ...alters and triptychs ...cut stones and bones ...angels and puttis  ...pastries & shiny tiny spoons ...so many wickets for tickets & styled food ...countless madonnas rising through tempra clouds  ...eroded frescoes with endless foldings of flowing drapery   ...undulating walks up and down a thousand bridges ...thin towels and cold marble floors ...constantly turning corners ...vaulted basilicas with the sounds all wrong ...sitting in rococo chairs and neighborhood squares ...I felt I had been stuffed to the back of  the Medieval junk drawer ...people still talked about the plague! The only open landscapes lay suffocating in the corners of Bellini’s panel paintings... ..one morning I had enough I was saturated with cultural beauty... my wild heart had been hammered thin as a piece of gilding gold by the weight of visual history ...I had to get home so like Giacometti’s woman I walked.


Now I live here at the beach ...a tiny spark of consciousness in a place of wild natural beauty... returned to my childhood landscape...



it is this landscape that now participates in my inner and outer world and is the subject of my photographic work.

Friday, March 13, 2009

TREES AS LIGHT




Our consciousness seeks patterns... although this pattern seeking is likely a survival mechanism there is certainly an acquired cultural inflection to this area of perception.  


In the natural landscape that which evokes a significant visual experience is appended to an underlying philosophy or vision. The patterns that rise up from chaos to create part of our experience are actually a manifestation of our consciousness...  not an insight into the visual nature of existence.  When we move through a landscape we are not just flowing through a topography we are also moving through our own subconscious projections and philosophies.


Wednesday, March 11, 2009

MOON


Full moon last night....




Moonlight makes a restless night for me.  There is only light from the night sky here so when the moon is full it’s light will wake me... or perhaps what wakes me is the creatures... there is a lot of nocturnal hunting going on at the full moon.


So... I was up watching the night sky and thinking about Icarus... you know... if he had taken flight by moonlight he would have escaped the maze and his fatal fall... and I would never have photographed him as a memento mori on the sands of my beach.


My images of Icarus initiated a conceptual flight of my own... Icarus was a visual metaphor for how deeply my experience in the landscape was an acquired cultural construct. My cultural inheritance was creating an ambiguous play between what I believed and what I perceived... what was known and what was seen. I was engaged with a consensual reality... I had actually never experienced or photographed the beach as it truly was.


Human beings are pattern seekers... we devise constructs to distill and organize an unfathomable and vast mystery.


Monday, March 9, 2009

PUDDLE ICE

Ice and snow last night...



everything is transformed...  even the puddles are busy being new

Sunday, March 8, 2009


Yes... there he is Icarus... the fallen apple of the stoic eye...




Greek mythology is deep in our cultural wellspring.  The Icarus metaphor shows up frequently in the arts... he has descended from the rafters of theaters, taken flight in Irish novels, singed his feathers in heavy metal music, been suspended motionless in canvas & stone...  and surprisingly for a mythological person he has been photographed many times... also by me when he shows up at the beach.


When I encounter Icarus here I get the end of the story... barely there like a mothprint on a window... he will disappear with the tide... the flight is over... the wing is already broken... 




I once had a problem with the Icarus metaphor... I don’t believe it was his fate to fall... I do not believe that extreme liberation is doomed to failure.


The failure to me is in the Stoic mind that created Icarus... he was a mirror of their conceptions and a victim of a technology that had failure as an intrinsic component of it’s design. The Stoic consciousness resided within the philosophy of ‘fly right’ and do not deviate from the middle path...  Icarus is given a structure within which he cannot manifest his true nature... the paradigm of escape is as stringent and confining as the maze.


I always photograph Icarus when I see him... but not as a spiritual metaphor of defeat... something else is going on and Icarus turned out to be for me a way to a different perception of the landscape... Icarus helped me fly.


Saturday, March 7, 2009

WINGS

Often at dawn the beach is still dark and primal...





it will manifest it’s existence in unexpected ways in our consciousness.



Friday, March 6, 2009

SANDPIPERS


Oh.... pipers!




See them there... they are like in a dream... barely discernible... smeared in time.

 

Perhaps it is just poor photography... or perhaps it is the aesthetic of memory in photography... a derivative of pictorialism.


Many times I will be at the beach and a small group of sandpipers will fly in... immediately they will begin stitching the edges of the waves with their beaks looking for feed.  They are so tiny and frail and they have come so far to be here in this moment... the little pipers come from the lagoons of South America.... migrate to Alaska and then return... an ancient cycle of life... an epic journey for such a small creature.


They flow in and out... tracking the lip of each wave... each movement has such precise surety... I believe that unlike me, they have probably never experienced doubt.  Here they are on this incredible journey that they have never questioned or doubted because it is the absolute true manifestation of being a sandpiper.


I am sure that in their little hearts they have absolute faith in every moment of life and that each of these moments are exactly as they should be... a moment to be accepted and lived as part of their great migration.


I think that perhaps much of our emotional suffering comes from the perspective of doubt... so now I try to have an open heart to each moment as existence chooses to present it to me and have the faith of the little sandpipers... that things are exactly as they should be on the flyway and it is all leading to the possibility of something as wonderful as the sapphire lagoons of South America.




Thursday, March 5, 2009

STAR

Let’s meet the neighbors...




No worries... I put my hand in the ocean before I picked her up... I wonder what she thinks my hand is... she and I are having very different experiences at this moment in time... I wonder if she thinks I am Annie Leibovitz... Annie Leibovitz photographs the stars.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

WINDING TREE


 we pass this tree on the way to the beach...



... beauty in spite of adversity ...we all have it in us



Tuesday, March 3, 2009

MODERN WAVE

All of my work here at the shore hinges on this image...





Yes I know...  the camera is probably leaking light... the highlights are blown out... there are  issues with grain... the sky looks like the sand... the negative has been absolutely hammered in the developer and yes, those aren’t birds in the sky it’s dust...  This image is a photographer’s nightmare. 


Making this image is one of the most important things that has ever happened to me.  It is a hinge that changed the way I see the world... actually, if you stare at it for a minute the wave does seem a bit like a hinge of sky and land. Look at it... really look at it... it is an amazing thing... something important is happening... 


                                           It is a modern wave.


The ocean slammed this beach for eons... incomprehensible numbers of waves... a primordial rhythm... unobserved by consciousness.  Ancient people lived at this beach and the waves were codified and iconified into their stories, their art, their religion... the ocean was mystical. Waves like my wave did not exist.


What is important about this wave is that it went through a camera... it is still... but it is still in a particular way.  


No one could have perceived waves this way until the camera came along... slicing time... stacking light.  Go into the images of waves in painting... there are still waves there... but they are different... they do not have the illusory flavor of reality.  If you can find one in a Medieval painting... they are rare and they are absolutely bizarre to our consciousness.  


My wave is everywhere in the modern world... I see people photographing waves at the beach all the time... there are probably enough images of waves to paper the entire surface of the oceans... but I believe that each of them is just as bizarre as the Medieval  painted wave... none of them are real... they are perceptions... the photograph floats on a meniscus of illusion.  I am not referring to the the traditional dialectic about photography... that has become tedious... I think it separates you from what is really happening with the images.


Something amazing is happening... I am slicing time  and dividing space and stacking light with my cameras and I think I am approaching something... 


                                     suchness


lets go... I’ll show you how it happened.