Speaking of rain

I posted a photo last year- see Rain- which I had taken in response to a various comments I had heard at Emmanuel about our being in a bleak time of year. As it happens last year, at the end of March, we were also having a good bit of wet weather. While that photo made my point about color I was always dissatisfied with it. My Canon camera was new, and I eventually replaced the lens. This year on the same date we were having similar weather so I returned to the location, this is the result. The location is the Longwood stop on the green line. This is taken from the bridge over the Muddy River which brings on from Beth Israel via Winsor School, a route I travel all too frequently.

Rain

Yes, I've been silent, really neglectful for 21 days, but have both excuses and explanations. The biggest excuse is that Dr. Funk and I positively wore ourselves out with Boston Early Music Festival performances. The smaller excuses are far less interesting and so I won't bore you with them. The Festival, by the way, was truly amazing.

And now we have all this rain, which is a current subject. I have an understanding of the world that probably comes from having nearly exited it: that there is amazing beauty in every day, regardless of the weather. Some time ago I set myself the objective of putting on paper the beauty that I find even on a cold and rainy day in March. I assure you that I see the beauty depicted in the photo above, but unfortunately my camera didn't. This image represents quite a struggle, which has been going on for some time now. At one point I thought I would have to declare a failure, but I had a specific reason to persevere.

This view is from the footbridge that leads over the Muddy River on the path from Beth Israel to the Longwood "T" stop, a route well travelled by me. It happens that the people at Beth Israel have requested some of my work for the walls of the Radiology department, a place with which I'm very familiar. One of the people I've been talking too about this has actually told me that these images have caused her to pay more attention while she's moving through the world, more attention to the beauty around her, and that has caused her to appreciate it more. I was very pleased about that! But a rainy march day?

Yes, a rainy march day, when the buds on the maple trees are just starting to create a red haze in the woods, and willows are pushing out their tiny catkins and the ground is glowing with the acid green of emerging grass and damp moss. Next March, on such a day, as you are hurrying on your, way look up and say to yourself "if I were never to see this again....."

Being the hearty Episcopalian that I've become I can't say much about what is and what isn't, about certainties and acting "As if" things were true, or certain, or able to be known; but I do feel that what ever the ultimate answer is, however a covenant may be kept or broken, that gratitude and appreciation will keep most of the celestial bases covered, and keep our own heart happy.

Which is another thing I find I share with the BI!

orange pink sky

Since I mentioned the orange pink sky here it is!

Spring evenings

I have been rather absent from my blog, and now "the Other Reader" has shown me up once again so I'll have to get in gear and blog (and read "Ulysses".) Life has at present certain pressures and new responsibilities that have been calling me away from my studiola and it's ambiance of introspection. But I have not been idle, and so I thought I would share a recent photograph.

Now I will write a tiny bit about making pictures. This is a photograph of the very pleasant South West Corridor Park, looking toward the Hancock Tower. 

Recently I made reference to the destruction of my house, and have also referred to some of the trials I have had to endure, but my fortune has not been altogether bad, in fact it all turned out quite well. You see this is where I live, in a tiny little room in a warm and quirky house owned by a very kind man and inhabited by interesting and caring tenants. Every journey I take starts and ends here- my door is just a few steps away, and it is wonderfully beautiful. The magnolias in the last post are just a bit further along, and the hancock tower is always there, brooding or brilliant by turns.

So you think that you now know what this is a picture of, since I have described the place I took it, but in fact there is more.

I have been using a camera as my principal means of visual expression since 2004. I phrased that carefully. I was trained as a painter- landscape to amuse myself and portraits for income. There has always been a tension in me between the fine arts and the applied arts, to use very old fashioned terms. When I was painting I was playing the dilettante at design, and when involved in design I was a dilettante painter. Of the two, visual imagery is the stronger compulsion, and as difficult as my periods of illness have been they have given me the time to focus on that aspect of my creative life. Alas, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and in this case along with some time, I was also given peripheral neuropathy and lost the ability to control my hands. The camera had always been a reference tool for my painting, and now it moved into the primary position. Digital, computers, photoshop! You will think it odd to say, but I really feel that the excitement of learning all this new stuff gave me the impetus to survive some very bleak times, and still does as a matter of fact. It has been very rewarding, and I do think I'm doing pretty well with it.

The first group of pieces I did were a big surprise: they were totally abstract! Then I became very involved with very stylized landscape, then very romantic landscape, then another little stumbling block popped up- I became almost totally housebound last year- no afternoon rambles in the Fenway victory gardens or in the Arboretum. I was lucky if it could get the six doors to the spot you see in the photograph above. That is when I fell in love with the Hancock Tower. 

It is relatively easy to go to some absolutely beautiful location and use the camera to make a record of it's beauty. Some skill is involved of course, but you're getting a lot of help from the Big Ungendered Person who created the beauty for you to record; but when you can't get there anymore the nature of the challenge changes rather a lot, and that was what I faced last year. If I was going to make pictures I had to make them right at home.

How many pictures can a person take of the Hancock Tower? Quite a lot, as it turns out- but really the tower is a kind of red herring. These pictures are actually about the day and the time I took them. They are about the passing of the season, about fragile balances of light and air. About temperature, about darkness and rain. There are days when the sun reflecting off the tower balances almost perfectly with the sun itself and we stand with shadows casting before and behind us, the light enveloping the plants and passersby in a glow that I've only before seen at the edge of death. Snow falling under the sodium vapor lamps from an orange pink sky, or rain making a mirror of the walkway- that's what all my recent photographs are about. I'll start showing them to you.

We talk in our discussion group about prayer, and I often say that I don't pray. but really I do- with my camera.