A Learning/Playing Day

It was cold outside yesterday (and again today)! So I decided to have

A Learning/Playing Day

in my home studio yesterday and today.

Yesterday morning I made and edited photos of the flowers and cherry blossom twigs that I bought the day before at the greenhouse. As is often the case, on my second day of working with these flowers I felt like I created images that I liked much better than those I created the first day I worked with them. Photographing flowers is sort of like getting to know a person. Not everything is revealed at first glance. It takes curiosity, time and presence to learn deeply.

One needs to be still enough, observant enough, and aware enough to recognize the life of the materials, to be able to ‘hear through the eyes.’

— Paul Caponigro

Yesterday afternoon I spent a lot of time studying book making videos and researching different photo papers. I found a very promising two-sided Hahnemuhle rag photo paper online that I wish I had found and tried earlier. It is designed for book and album making. And it looks perfect for what I want to create.

This morning I tried a construction technique using a strip of tyvek paper to connect 2 book pages together with prints made on single-sided photo paper. After connecting two 2-page spreads this way, I glued the front edge of the center blank sides of the photo paper together creating “pages” that have photos or text on both sides. It worked pretty well though making the connections exactly correct is a very picky process. The kind of precision and patience required for this is not my forte.

Tyvek strip used to connect two photo pages together, stack of two 2-page spreads connected with tyvek

Back and Forth

As in many creative endeavors I move two steps forward and one step back again and again. And sometimes I don’t move forward at all, only backwards because of something new that I learn. I think that I am almost ready to make a book prototype. But I also plan to try to set up a consultation with a book making instructor to discuss my project and get her take on the approaches I am exploring.

I’m pondering what my next steps should be — try a couple of more experiments or work on setting up a consultation with an expert art book maker? In the meantime I expect I will spend more time photographing the flowers I bought earlier this week.

Visions of Spring

It feels like this winter will never end! Still, some days I manage to see the beauty of the snow as it falls.

Snow Aldo

Once, I was in New York,

in Central Park, and I saw

an old man in a black overcoat walking

a black dog. This was springtime

and the trees were still

bare and the sky was

gray and low and it began, suddenly,

to snow:

big fat flakes

that twirled and landed on the

black of the man’s overcoat and

the black dog’s fur. The dog

lifted his face and stared up at the sky. The man looked

up, too. “Snow, Aldo,” he said to the dog,

“snow.” And he laughed.

The dog looked at him and wagged his tail.

If I was in charge of making

snow globes, this is what I would put inside:

the old man in the black overcoat,

the black dog,

two friends with their faces turned up to the sky

as if they were receiving a blessing,

as if they were being blessed together

by something

as simple as snow

in March.

  — Kate DiCamillo.

I saw a video (on Instagram) of magnolias in profuse bloom in Paris this week and I so wished that I could be there to see them. If you have an account on Instagram, check out Paris photographer, Georgianna Lane’s reel of the Palais Royale magnolias in bloom HERE.

I am working on resting in this open space between winter and “not yet spring,” seeking to let grace come alive each day in its own way.

The more I learned to rest in the open, empty spaces, the more Grace came alive inside—literally, as Ramana says, “sprouting as a spring from within.”

   — Miranda Macpherson, The Way of Grace

May you walk in beauty.