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"Words in an unknown language."

9/17/2022

In a short story I read recently, called, "Easy Street," by T. Jefferson Parker, a character was experiencing a harsh trauma, and it nearly paralyzed him. As he sat, Parker writes, "Objects passed his vision like words in an unknown language." Well, I thought, that's how the world looks to me every day. I have to continually make the effort to place things I see, and interact with them as merely useful, or somehow practical, objects. It takes work just to function in this world of strange objects that continually pass me by "like words in an unknown language."

These are the only two images from my grad school days (c.1991) that I still have hanging in my studio. They are oil stick on rag board, in the neighborhood of about 18 x 24 inches. I haven't worked this way in a long time, but one day, when the time is right, I plan to apply myself to expressing my visual experience in this way again, to depict what the world looks like when objects pass my vision "like words in an unknown language."
The short story appears in 2001 Best American Mystery Stories.

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September 10th, 2022

9/10/2022

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I find many people think crop circles are a fad from the '90s when they were in the news. Additionally they are under the impression that since a couple of young men claimed to have made them all with boards and string then that's the end of that. But there are an average of 150 of them that still show up every year with complex and perfectly executed geometry, and there have been thousands to date. And they are all exquisite (like this one from earlier this summer) not to mention huge. And we still don't know who is making them or why. I, for one however, am very grateful to whoever is making them. They are absolutely stunning, aren't they? (Photos by Stonehenge Dronescapes)