This morning the lawn was brilliant with yellow leaves and a windy light. By late afternoon the sky had darkened, and snow is predicted tomorrow. I looked at the fallen lillies and melting hostas, all the garden’s brave last gasps of color, and laid my head upon the memory of summer. Where is that attic bedroom, that one with chenille bedspread and the embroidered pillow? The one where afternoon light motes were gold as pollen and the bees gathered in the windowsills….?
This is the summer of endless elegy. The forms and colors of winter persist even as the sun comes out for a day or two and temperatures climb above 70. The newly planted vine maple is already turning red and I have not yet gone swimming. Only the foxgloves have been jubilant; this is the year I realized they aren’t weeds and let them go wild, a pearl and purple trumpet section playing throughout the garden.
This transfer print blends the layers of sunlight past with autumn’s melancholies. The echinacea laid its stems at my feet last October. The sunlight came from my favorite yellow wall at 85th and Greenwood, photographed in 2009, recently graffitied with a luscious red heart and then abruptly painted beige. I am glad I captured its past life in my archives.
I am focusing on transfer prints exclusively right now, enraptured with the tools of the camera and the newest version of Photoshop. I am in that place where you try absolutely everything and sit back dazzled, and then subtract ninety percent of the possible, in search of the necessary. I’ll be moving back and forth all summer between two very different themes: the garden, and the street. The hard urban surfaces seem to need the antidote of what grows from the watering can and dirt. See more of these images in the gallery The Natural World
The moon keeps appearing in surprising places. I’ve seen it pre-dawn in the east trapped in branches strung with dew. Last night it seemed to rise in the West. And I haven’t seen it overhead in a long while. If it fell into my pocket would I even recognize it among the dimes and five-cent buffalos? I went to school (for awhile), I read the books and took the tests and traced the oval diagrams. How can it be that I have lost touch and cannot tell you if the moon moves in the same or different direction from the sun? The sky has held winter for so long I seem to look up only at the edges of the day, and so I forget: I don’t know who is rotating around whom. A long time ago they established that one of us is standing still, and one is spinning, and we all learned a lesson in humility. Surely if the orbits changed they would tell me, and the world would be in tears.
In this version the woman reads no books. She wades in the water, she has many minds shaped like the moon, and at the edges of the desert, tulips bloom.