Bunch of Squares

A bunch back to back quick because making money to live takes time away from light…

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Wreathed, Wisconsin River Bottoms

After an early season, single digit deep-freeze, SW Wisconsin warmed up into the 40’s this weekend. Those kind of rapid temperature swings over a day or two produce heavy, gorgeous fog in the river bottoms. The winter river’s austerity, creaking ice, tufted marshes and the wet, black boughs of submerged trees swaying against the grey cotton skies produce a kind of reverence for a wildness we cannot know, from which we postmodern humans have been divorced and remain, most of the time, estranged. Therein the deepest yearning lurks as our starved eyes feed on the wilderness we’ve lost.

WI River Bottoms, December 2014

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All Revved Up

All Revved Up, Know Where to Go

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Three Visions of St Francis

Summertime growing up in Villas, NJ lots of my friends’ families were Catholic, Irish or Italian, some German or Polish. Almost all were blue collar, factory & shipyard workers. Or they got by otherwise. Some stayed with grandparents. The blessed Virgin was ubiquitous: on dashboards, front lawns, jewelry, framed next to her Son in every dining room where the mother fed the neighbor kids as well as her own. Some kids went to St Raymond’s school on Bayshore Road, but most went back to Philly, where their real homes were; the Villas was for summer vacation, fresh air for the kids, breathing room for mom and the Villas Fishing Club on the bay for men- only. The boardwalk over in Wildwood for everybody with a car or bus fare.

Labor Day Weekend marked the end of summer firmly as a door closing. The following Monday morning the streets were silent, window blinds pulled down, driveways- twelve hours earlier festooned with wading pools, kids, grills, beer bottles & fishing gear, empty. A vacuous quiet descended. Left behind we were all watchers in this new found emptiness, watchful for artifacts of the prior occupants, for signs that summer had existed at all. Mary would stare dolefully back at us from within her blue robes at various locations throughout the neighborhood, daring our trespass.

And then there was St Francis, keeper of beasts & of nature, benevolent & compassionate. Guardian of the wildness inside us all and protector of the earth, he would keep watch along the bay all winter long, and ever after.

Three Visions of St Francis Guarding the Delaware Bay

Three Visions of St Francis Guarding the Delaware

Three Visions of St Francis Guarding the Delaware Bay

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Chasing Iconography Down the Road

Paul Vanderbilt & Alec Soth’s current Madison exhibits and accompanying text/audio and Frank Gohlke’s Thoughts On Landscape have me thinking about visual rhythms, algorithms and typologies.

Photos individual, paired, in series syncopate with what- anticipations, expectations, apprehensions?– in the viewer. And the resulting resonance renders them meaningful. Or.

The thing in itself, the subject without the photo, the photo without the viewer, retains meaning in situ independent of the intervening  eyes. Is it when the human attention drawn to the object of the len’s affection focusses deeply in that moment,  that the recognition of coincident, adjacent, harmonic- or dissonant– significance in the image(s) occurs? & Association liberates vision from its expectations.

And thinking too much impedes seeing:) A series of random views that made me stop and shoot during recent travels:

Umbrellas at Willow Vineyard, Cape May

Levitation. Seaport promenade, Manhattan (thanks to Liz S. for the tipoff!)

Wisconsin River Autumn, early morning

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Wheel Wet Wisconsin

Droid cam snap with Instafilters on another rainy still like  Spring day in SW Wisconsin #feelslikeseattle

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