Full-frontal Spiritual Manifestations: gods, godlets, daemons and other beings is now live in extremely provisional form.
Here’s an absolutely iconic image, once seen never forgotten:
Of course there’s plenty of backstory to the poem, and Alice’s response is both marvelous and (Carroll-like) applicable to all sorts of things one has encountered:
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!
In the magical wood at the end of Horse Point Road I encountered an uprooted tree that was immediately evocative of the Jabberwock. I’ve messed with photographing it and processing the resulting image several times:
Some of my photographs and tessellations are just plain overwhelming, with too much going on for a viewer to parse without some sort of guidance to what I see that makes an image worth promulgating:
and
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899 – 1977)
My eye went immediately to “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip,” which seems apposite to my pleasure in mirroring images to find out what else they have to tell us [as Minor White might have said]. Putting aside the butterflies, or substituting rock and wood for “rare butterflies and their food plants”, the whole rings pretty much true, but of course what I like to do is unfold the magic carpet. And visitors are most welcome to trip.
I venture out on a photographic adventure and see thing after thing, possibility upon possibility, line and pattern and design, reminiscence and allusion. Many of my digital captures only develop on the computer screen as I recognize unanticipated (or anyhow unconsciously expected) graphic elements, and some only mature once I’ve lived with the results for a while. That’s especially true of those I decide to try tessellating: few images are taken in expectation of their products once mirrored (that is, I rarely see the potential mirror image in the camera’s viewfinder), and I can’t often predict what the result will be until I try the old flip-copy-join recipe.
And there a difficulty arises. My fevered imagination draws upon a lifetime of images seen and takes special pleasure in graphic analogy. I see things that are manifestly not there. Broot (adept as she is at the abstract) summarizes the difference between our approaches to photographic exploration, “you make something out of nothing; I make nothing out of something.” She also notes, sagely, that if she saw all those faces, she’d not be able to see the abstract.
So how can I convey what I discover in my images to audiences? The enigmatic or whimsical title, often alluding to something I draw from the image, is a happy affectation, but doesn’t convey its message very clearly to puzzled viewers. I know what I need next, but I’m not sure how to realize it. Herewith an outline, thanks to a book that rolled in a couple of days ago, By the Glow of the Jukebox: The Americans List II [Conceived and Compiled by Jason Eskenazi (Author), Jno Cook (Illustrator)]. This is just the sort of tiny-niche bit of bijoux fugitivia I love to discover and possess, but it needs a bit of explanation.
Robert Frank’s The Americans is arguably one of the most influential photographic books of the mid-20th century (first published in 1958), and is still making waves among photographers, still being discussed and influencing the work of new discoverers of its singular (well, multiple) views of America. Here’s the Amazon description of By the Glow:
While working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Eskenazi began to ask photographers he knew visiting the Looking In exhibition [2009] about Robert Frank’s The Americans, to choose their favorite image and why. In the years since he quit, as he himself got back out on the road again to shoot, he complied hundreds of photographers’ answers in this unique book destined to become a classic in photography education…
I got the first edition of By the Glow a few years ago, and hadda buy the second. I was delighted to find Jno Cook’s spare but effective drawings of Frank’s photographs, which are just the sort of thing I need to convey to viewers what I see in my photographs and tessellations. Here’s one of Jno Cook’s renderings of an iconic image from The Americans:
But how exactly to proceed? How can I make the drawings that reveal what I see? The technology surely includes Layers in Illustrator or GIMP, and probably the Wacom tablet I bought a while ago with high hopes, but haven’t yet managed to tame to my purposes. And of course the skills to create a workflow that I can actually live with…
Here’s one of those bits of visual serendipity that keeps me barreling down the figurative mountain of photographic wonderment. Ever on the lookout for interesting patterns in rocks, and especially for little faces peering up at me, I collected this one a few days ago:
Still, it wasn’t until I mirrored the image that the message of this particular lithic citizen emerged:
Thanks to the unexpected appearance of the November Pumpkin, another Project is in the offing, starting to gather downhill speed as I rifle through the archive of tessellations with a weather eye out for appearances of super-naturals. I have a working title
Full-frontal Spiritual Manifestations: gods, godlets, daemons and other beings
and soon there will be a Weblet to display the work in progress. Stay tuned.
A technical exercise in transformations, starting with a photograph of a Mount Auburn Cemetery beech tree:
The next thought was to make a 4x tessellation, which produces an image of a vajra (Sanskrit) or dorje (Tibetan), understood by Mahayana Buddhism as representing a diamond or thunderbolt.
A diamond is spotlessly pure and indestructible. The Sanskrit word means “unbreakable or impregnable, being durable and eternal”. As such, the word vajra sometimes signifies the lighting-bolt power of enlightenment and the absolute, indestructible reality of shunyata, “emptiness.”
(see more at thoughtco.com)
So what, or where, does all this flipping get us? Certainly a long way from the original beech tree, and (if we choose to go there) deep into representation of the mysteries of cosmic forces. Each transformation is a flight of fancy, an excursion into what if…, a disclosure of possibility, and an alternative reading of the implications and thus the meaning of the antecedent image. Form Finds Form.
Some creatures only appear once, never to be found again, accidents of light and angle and fate. This is one such:
Other readings are of course possible. The ‘musk ox’ could be a disgruntled chimpanzee, and the ‘elephant’ may be an open-jawed creature about to bite Statler’s head off as the tiger looks on. YMMV.
This one has enough enigma to satisfy any devotee of the obscure:
So: in search of hidden essences, I first mirrored the left side and produced a rather more unsettling face, reminiscent of The Mask of Agamemnon:
After a 24-hour period of contemplation, this image
I’ve been trying to figure out effective and efficient means to parse some of my more …erm… complicated images, to reveal what I see hidden in them. If I had the chops to be able to reproduce what I see as drawings, cartoons, or even tracings, I would spend many happy hours rendering photographic captures into hand-drawn graphics. While I can imagine what such translations would look like, I certainly haven’t the powers or skills to realize my imaginings. Yesterday it occurred to me that the combination of details clipped out and narrative might be effective enough to begin with. Here’s the starting point for today’s exercise:
On the left I see a crowned bird-headed Hieronymus Boschish figure in a speckled robe, looking to the left over its right shoulder:
Below that is a long-toothed and perhaps cat-like nightmare figure, reminiscent of Ralph Steadman’s graphic style:
and to the right of those is a flame-haired human figure, arms raised and possibly with Harry Potter glasses or maybe just preternaturally googly eyes:
and on the far right edge, a long-snouted foxy-horsey creature, with what might be a single horn on its head:
You may see none of these, or find other figures that I haven’t yet discerned. There’s another shot of most of the same scene, from the other side, which offers a whole different array of interpretative challenges:
For the moment, I’ll just point out the insouciant but demented (and possibly fanged) flying squirrel in the upper left:
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
and its Lindy Hop variant
Addendum:
went back a couple of days later and found the pair still muttering to one another:
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:
The muppets Statler and Waldorf, don’t you think?
