Monthly Archives: October 2018

first, catch your beech tree

A technical exercise in transformations, starting with a photograph of a Mount Auburn Cemetery beech tree:


7x18MtAuburnbeech11

It occurred to me to wonder how the image would be changed with a simple black-to-white inversion, easily accomplished in GIMP (with some cropping, to clarify the image). The result seems to emphasize the form that first attracted me to make the original image:

inverted beech

Creatures manifest, if one is open to such things, but in this case I decided to work further with the abstract forms via a mirror image and vertical flip:

inverted beechx2

I can read this version in several ways, imagining for instance the head-on view of a duck in flight in heavy weather, or a wrathful English judge in full-bottomed wig about to deliver a death sentence (the black cap on his head…), though you may be excused if you see neither of those figures.

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)

invbeechx4

…and that led to wondering what would happen if the image was inverted again, back to its original black-is-black configuration:

inverted beechx4inv

The last two images are also reminiscent of illustrations of magnetic fields, as seen with bar magnets and iron filings.

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.

still more imagination

Some creatures only appear once, never to be found again, accidents of light and angle and fate. This is one such:


DI26x1864

It took me a day or two to see the elephant and the sharp-goateed tiger:

DI26x1866

and not until today did I discover (1) the muppet Statler on the left side:
Statlerpair
and (2) a nameless musk ox on the right:

muskoxpair

I don’t think I could find that rock again, and even if I did, I doubt that those creatures would manifest again.

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.

the morning’s fun

This one has enough enigma to satisfy any devotee of the obscure:


DI26x1852

It’s a fissure in a large rock mass, but the two sides seem to have had quite different histories of erosion. The left-hand panel seems obviously to sport a grinning but rather lopsided face, but the right side is less easily parsed into something that makes sense.

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:

leftside

A quick mirroring of the right side also produced a sort of face, perhaps a bearded figure not unlike my friend Daniel Heikalo:

rightside

…and then it occurred to me to flip that panel vertically, to reveal a gently smiling portrait of a being with an insectoid headpiece:
right side upside down

The conceit of the moment is topological: the two halves are meeting at a corner of tesseractoid hyperspace. But other readings are possible. At the bottom of the left side there might be a demonic motorcyclist:
left side detail1
or it may be that the mirrored left side should also be flipped vertically to reveal a wrathful or perhaps merely disapproving godlike being:

wrathful

yes, rather a stretch

After a 24-hour period of contemplation, this image

DI26x1851

resolves into a Dwarf (note pointy hat, beard, general air of lawn ornamentude)

26x51a
being shouted at by an irate customer (possibly a baboon) wth elaborate purplish headgear
26x51b

OBO

revealing the hidden

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:


20x18087

What it is : a stretch of highly-figured Drift Inn rock, 5 or 6 feet wide, with tidewater pooled in hollows (the white-flecked areas).

On the left I see a crowned bird-headed Hieronymus Boschish figure in a speckled robe, looking to the left over its right shoulder:


20x1887details1b

Below that is a long-toothed and perhaps cat-like nightmare figure, reminiscent of Ralph Steadman’s graphic style:


20x1887details3

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:


20x1887details2

and on the far right edge, a long-snouted foxy-horsey creature, with what might be a single horn on its head:


20x1887details4
.

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:


20x18086

For the moment, I’ll just point out the insouciant but demented (and possibly fanged) flying squirrel in the upper left:


20x1886detail1

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

20x18166

and its Lindy Hop variant

20x18166a


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:

DI23x1801

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

DI26x1802

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:


DI23x1812

DI23x1817

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

Stepping into that same river

Sometimes a second pass at an image reveals an unanticipated reading or unleashes a sleeping daemon. This one is OK but undistinguished, a bit of beach with outflowing stream and modest figure in the sand:

DI14x18103


but turn the sucker 180 degrees and crop just a bit and a whole new scene emerges, considerably more sculptural in its sensibilities:

bas relief of the damned


I was immediately reminded of Rodin’s Gates of Hell, which I visited a few years ago at Stanford’s Cantor Museum. I wish I’d spent more time photographing its details, but here’s one:

Rodin's Gates of Hell detail

The point here is a back-handed homage to Minor White’s famous dictum

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

And then I thought … what would happen if I inverted the repurposed image?


damned inverted

breakfast today

So there I was, most of the way through today’s breakfast (my version of menemen, Turkish eggs with tomato and scallion and Urfa peppers and oregano, with a side of kimchi) and this showed up:


breakfast face

A supercilious Yoda? A jaundiced Eleanor Roosevelt? You decide.

Oscar checks in

I quite liked this image as an abstract:


MP10x1804

But after looking at it for a few days it seemed to resolve into a portrait of Oscar Wilde (the swoop of grey on the right side evoking his forelock as it appears in many portraits). I went looking via Google Image and found numerous eidetic candidates. Here’s one that exemplifies:


(from electricliterature.com/)

onomastics

(a fancy word for naming)

Images often announce their identities, sometimes quite a while after their first appearances. Here’s a case of two framings of one bit of rock, and my different readings of their essence after a couple of days of looking at them on Flickr.

MP10x1815

dreams of a demented baboon

The lower obviously (!) depicts the dreams of a demented baboon, or so my onomastic intuition informed me. The baboon is in the lower center, two eyes and a brownish snout surrounded by a cascading chaos of curves and emergent figures. When I (somewhat later) explored the upper image it seemed to present the same face in a different setting, more of a whirlwind that brought to mind a Shinto spirit (kami) such as those one can experience in Miyazaki’s wonderful film Spirited Away (in Japanese: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi), a sense of swirling motion in the curves below the face.

These readings are utterly idiosyncratic, and it’s unlikely that anybody else would have seen those different versions without my prompting, but they seem more plausible and obvious each time I look at them. This happens a lot out our way.