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Saturday, 05 December 2009

Currently
C'mon Miracle
By Mirah
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Family.

"Intimacy is a really important part of photography, at least for me. I think we are oversaturated with images that are glossy and distant, putting a celebrity or star on a pedestal. There's something really beautiful about keeping things simple and intimate and the way they are." - Lauren Dukoff (below, photos from her book Family - there's something about it which fascinates me utterly, nudging me to follow her lead)

I increasingly want to capture the world/my share in it - the people I love, the beauty I see, the comfort I find, the light. Always the light. We watched the sun come up over the mountains today, from the top of a hill with a 360 view of the valley. Bundled and with blood still flowing healthily to our extremities from the trek up, we were warm as we waited for the sun to crest, for a time. After the blood slowed we huddled, half behind a huge boulder with increasing wonder and and exclamation as it inched upward, until - light flooded and we were all golden.

I raise my camera and lower it again when no one inhabits the beautifully lit space.

These past days have been mostly touched with golden beams; wide smiles from my housemates, frozen hands and faces for the four of us piled on a quad in the dying sunlight, three of us giggling fully clothed in a bathtub trying to warm up, two bottles of scotch and four glasses on a heavy coffeetable, guitars played, voices lifted and warm glances. Silly kung fu in a parking lot before a movie theatre sneak in and reading lights clicked off for the fourth night in a row of a good night's sleep, unhaunted by unmade decisions and silence. It is well.

It is so good to be well.

Wednesday, 02 December 2009

Lately, I've drawing and painting. Et voila. Below, some samples.

Paris Mime

Moleskin 85

Tuesday, 01 December 2009

Currently
Veckatimest
By Grizzly Bear
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The Best Of.

I'll send you picture so you won't forget me. Carry the fire we started.

(A mushy, brown peach id lifted from the garbage and placed on the table to pinken. It pinkens, turns hard, it is carried in a shopping sack to the grocer's, put on a shelf, removed and crated, returned to the tree with pink blossoms. In this world, time flows backwards.

The woman makes excursions from her small house, goes to the market, occasionally visits a friend, drinks tea at cafes in good weather. She takes needles and yarn from the bottom drawer of her dresser and crochets. She smiles when she likes her work. One day her husband, with whitened face, is carried into her house. In hours, his cheeks become pink, he stands stooped over, straightens out, speaks to her. Her house becomes their house.

A man stands at the graveside of his friend, throws a handful of dirt on the coffin, feels the cold April rain on his face. But he does not weep. He looks ahead to the day when his friend's lungs will be strong, when his friend will be out of his bed and laughing, when the two of them will drink ale together, go sailing, talk. He does not weep. He waits longingly for a particular day he remembers in the future when he and his friend will have sandwiches on a low flat table, when he will describe his fear of growing old and his friend will nod gently, when the rain will slide down the glass of the window)

Above, inside the brackets, excerpts from Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman.

I have this idea that the words, the books, the film, the art, which we love is important. That it contains pieces of who truly are - that these fragments contain real reflections. Sentiments we are unable to articulate are put into words by those more able, photos taken, pictures drawn by those with the hands we lack - not the inspiration.

Photos by Todd Selby.

Saturday, 28 November 2009

Homeward Bound.

I am back on the road again, for a time, come January. Back to the only home that claims me - the prairies. I will spend the coldest month or so of the year between Regina/Winnipeg - tears freezing in my eyeballs, lips numbing and with at least (at least) one guaranteed, utterly embarrassing and totally painful wipeout. Flat on my back, cold in every direction, looking up at a bright blue sky.

The prairies are beautiful in the winter, blindingly white and endless - the pressure lifts in the expanse, letting you breathe. They're the setting for dreams and a beginning to a new year.

It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known. - Carson McCullers