petroglyphic gnomons

My friend Jan Broek, Argonaut of lexicographical vastnesses and master of le mot juste, seems always ready with a pithy showstopper, an observation distilled into an apposite phrase that may never have been spoken before, but which positively nails whatever he assays. His comment on my latest Album of Creatures:

…petroglyphic gnomons…

strange empathic encounters with the stony beings that bring us into terrestrial arrest

Van Gogh has nothing on your rabidic plunge…

It’s always worthwhile to consider what others see in and say about the images into which I invest (or from which I draw?) so much meaning. The constructive exercise of making meaning from fragments, of perceiving form in what might first appear chaotic, is surely worth documenting, explicating, tracing in line and word. I need to develop the tools to extract and display what I discover and discern.

I deal in the whimsical and the figurative, imagining the Story, as in Pas de Deux

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and its Lindy Hop variant

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Another recent example is this Rocky Conversation, in which the figure on the left passes stony comment to the askance-looking figure on the right:

20x18170 Rock Conversation

I got to wondering about the broader context of the duo and went back to Drift Inn a couple of days later to rephotograph the scene. I wasn’t surprised to find that the interlocutors weren’t so clearly present without the definition of the bright sun’s shade:

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Addendum:
went back a couple of days later and found the pair still muttering to one another:

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The ephemerality of rock is a perpetual surprise, looking different from hour to hour and day to day, and revealing new facets to every change of viewing angle. Here are two more of yesterday’s new perspectives on a beach that I’ve visited scores of times:


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The muppets Statler and Waldorf, don’t you think?

1 thought on “petroglyphic gnomons

  1. Jan Broek

    To construe the cognitive innuendos writ obscure but with compelling force on rock faces, crumbling walls and twilight visual confusions etc is the child’s play of our imaginative minds—Da Vinchi, Blackmer and all the way back to the flickering apparitions on cave walls in Lascaux etc where those humans simply accentuated what they saw. A delicious melange of interior and exterior visualizations that live on! Viva la imagination, that fertile delta where our interior and external landscapes merge and comingle, a portal into original comprehension for the young at mind.

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