Dragongate

Beddis Beach. Action photography of the child kind.

2011-10-03T12:23:00.000-07:00

One August day the family, us grandparents, our daughters and grandchildren, all drive down the road, over the hills and down to the ocean at Beddis Beach. On this rocky island, bathing beaches suitable for children are not that common. We park and walk down the leafy trail to the shore. A sunny day, the tide about half way up, several families sitting on beach logs or splashing warily in the shallows. Calm, except for the steady roll of waves from the passing stream of yachts out in Ganges Harbour. The little children run to the water and pause. Those waves! That four inch surf! With a shriek they rush in and with a shriek they run out again! That water is cold!

I have my camera of course, pictures of grandchildren are always in demand within the family ( and mostly not elsewhere), and I can see that this wild rushing in and out, the unselfconscious attitudes of these little bodies, has some interesting possibilities. I hate photos of children taken from adult eye level, small, big headed and down there, so I choose a reasonably wide angle to be sure I can capture a big enough slice of the scene and hand hold the camera at beach level. I will miss lots this way but with digital I can also take lots. Somewhere, sometime, if I keep clicking I might just catch something worth keeping.

This kind of photography requires a different approach from the carefully composed and organized shots of much landscape photography. It is all happening in the spit second, full of movement and changing expressions. Horizons angle wildly and add a sense of action. By the time I see a great shot it will be past so I set out to harvest images within a field of view relying on the beginning of an action sequence to prompt me to start shooting. I miss a lot and I catch a lot this way, but this approach feels appropriate to the subject, to the moment. Shriek!

Walking on the bottom of the sea

2011-10-03T11:26:00.000-07:00

The sun is just cresting the dark bulk of Reginald Hill, the morning air carries the first chill of Autumn and at the head of Fulford Harbour the tide is far, far out. A sandy flat seems to stretch almost to the horizon. It is a vivid seaweedy green in the first rays of light. I stop the car and take my camera for a walk on the bottom of the sea.

Luckily I am in my rubber boots, the flats are streaming with water and masses of squishy weed (except, I notice that one boot is leaking and soaking my sock) , but now I am here it is difficult to make interesting images. A large, wet, green plain with a distant rim of water, hills and glaring sun. Somehow, I must capture the reality of the sea bottom in an interesting way. A photograph is not just a record of something else but a new creation with its own inner relationships. Just ahead I see three rocks and gratefully position them in the foreground of my composition. Now at last there is something happening, a triangular pattern organizes the picture and everything now is related to it. I grasp the vastness of the beach-scape in relation to these rocks.

The sun is dimmed by cloud for a few moments and the bright green and the glare disappear. The sand, the blankets of weed, are dark forms enclosing pools of cool light from the sky. This change in light is dramatic and makes a whole new series of photographs possible. I also begin to vary the angle of my photos, looking down on details at my feet or placing the camera at sand level. Suddenly, back comes the sun to reflect brightly in the pools. Down at the level of the sea bottom I see the detail, the rivulets, the roils of weed.

Still, I can only make so much of this and search for some new element. Way off down the beach a big waterlogged fir tree is semi sunk in the sand, its trunk and branches encased in mussels and flying streamers of weed. I walk that way, snapping as I go, because one never really knows what will turn out to be useful later. At my new subject I take several angles, settings and ‘zooms’ and finally I place the camera behind a seaweed-draped branch and shoot from within the cast shadow. No glare, but black arm and backlit weed.

Right down at the water`s edge it is obvious that while the beach water is still streaming to the sea, the ocean itself is quickly moving back inland. This is a place of shifting boundaries and amorphous reflections. In the half hour I have been on the beach the light has changed several times. Once again I need a form to anchor my image and just out there is a black piling left over from some log booming from years ago. I wade into the shallows to get a better angle (my foot cannot get any wetter), squat carefully so the seagull and top of the piling will jut above the hill beyond and click away. A few boat waves rustle the sea`s calm surface.

I walk back along the steeper upper beach to the rattle of pebbles under my feet, the occasional down-spiral of maple leaves and dark shadows under overhanging branches. I begin to look away from the sun toward the brightly lit shore; branches, sun-bleached logs, big rocks, brightly coloured leaves. There is plenty of structure here, it is now a matter of selection, of isolating a few powerful shapes, colours and textures. The very opposite design problem from the flat beach behind me which is now rapidly filling with the sea once more.

Back at my car I pause to look back over the bay. In an hour I have taken many photos, mostly in difficult lighting conditions. I have explored a beach and found ways to tell its story in images. When I started, I simply walked down to the briefly exposed bottom of the sea and started interacting with this place with no clear agenda or idea of how to photograph it. An adventure! What I found there was partly the beach at low tide, partly the rising sun and time of year but also what I myself brought to it in terms of my picture making experience and preferences. That was actually hard work of the creative kind: camera settings, lens choices, shooting angles, the ability to visualize what this particular shot would look like in picture form. A challenge ready for me to take up. The satisfaction of working with a camera to picture something so transient, so dazzled in light on this early Fall morning.

......................................................................................

Note. Many who live on the island have seen the big petroglyph boulder between the cedars at Drummond Park, a reminder that there were people here for thousands of years before us recent immigrants arrived. There is a story that once that broad shallow beach, where the big boulder originally sat, was dry land until the great waves of a storm or tsunami claimed it back for the sea. Perhaps there was at one time a gravel bar, a lagoon and a village here that was swept away. It may even be a long ago memory from a time of rising sea levels. To walk far out into that weedy world is to step into prehistory a little. In the glaring light, the falling leaves, the moving tide, is an ancient world speaking to us.

The raft people #5 They reach the sea at last.

2011-09-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

When I started this model adventure series it was a chance to try out my new mini camera,( a Samsung T 70. ) I had become hooked on the possibilities of model photography earlier with a series I had done with a paper model canoe and its two paddlers and thought that a raft and modeling clay characters sailing on my pond would be fun to try. By combining a real photo of an imaginary scene with some photoshopping touch-ups I had developed a photo technique for storytelling in picture form.( Hang on, isn`t that movies?)

The raft people sailed on the pond ( a large lake to them) and then lived through an icy winter, - even ice sailing through a blizzard. With Spring, they dismantled their raft and built two narrow ones for following the stream to the sea. We met them last, portaging around a waterfall.

The scene opens with the raft reassembled and sailing along a long sandy shoreline. They sight a sailing ship that dwarfs their own raft ( the ‘Monshulu’, see Eric Newby`s ‘The last Grain Race’) and sail hard to catch up. They surge alongside and find the ship is in difficulties, trapped in shoaling waters. Before they know it the ship is broadside in the surf and the raft, which draws little water, can be of assistance even though waves are sweeping their decks. The dinghy is launched to carry a line to the Monshulu, but, alas, it fills with water and the paddler is lost ( raft people do not float).

An anchor is eventually carried out to deeper water, the ship is warped off and saved, but the three raft survivors have some difficult decisions to make. To carry on along this unfamiliar coastline with only three crewmembers or ship their raft as deck cargo on a voyage across the ocean. Will they struggle on or will they eventually sell the raft in Japan as raw logs?

The tangles. Westcoast Thoughts.

2011-08-15T09:38:00.000-07:00

While I have been making relatively bare and simple images in the past few months, - simplifying for strength and clarity -, I am also making complex images where the ‘point’ is clothed in layers of vegetation that are difficult to get past and really see what is going on. Mt. Maxwell is glimpsed through tangles, the little waves breaking on the beach are seen through branches, and the houseboat in the bay is sandwiched between tree trunks.

This is the reality of living on the raincoast that I am imaging here. We live at the foot of great trees and mountains and peer out at the world through the filters of our environment. It affects how we think; it is not easy to see the forms of our lives, the dominant pattern, through the crisscross of daily events and conflicting obligations.

So, these dense images that I make are important for me, are my reflection, but through my fascination for these interwoven lines and textures there is a crisscrossed web way of thinking developing for me as well. My world, my way of seeing it in its complexity of lines and shades of meaning.

At Batoche.

2011-07-25T10:39:00.000-07:00

Saskatchewan #6

I wrote this piece as an accompaniment for the photos, to illustrate how in this kind of photography it is not the spectacular image that is important so much as the one that gets closest to a truth; about a people, a place, a history, and the present day reality that has grown out of that past.

The Answer is Blowing in the Wind.

Why should we be concerned about the proportion of our European or Indian blood? Since we have some of each, gratitude and filial love command us to say: “We are Metis!” Louis Riel

Driving north of Saskatoon to a point on the prairie overlooking the South Saskatchewan River we came to the National Historic site of Batoche, the site of the final battle that broke the North-West Rebellion. A new interpretive center with the first of a series of dioramas, the old original church and residence that were built just a year before the defeat of the Metis in 1885 ( still showing the holes of musket balls), who were lead by Gabriel Dumont and Louis Riel. A graveyard full of historic family names and the mass grave of those Metis killed in the four day battle. A separate graveyard for the British soldiers. Depending on your viewpoint, a rebellion or a resistance. How to photograph this? How to understand it?

My daughter held up a card, “ There is a photographic contest, Dad, for several historic sites in Saskatchewan. Do you want to have a go?” We proceed in loose order across the field, toward the church, cameras at the ready, looking intently for the best targets. I crouch behind a wooden wheel and shoot from between the spokes. Closer in, I angle a shot up the spire and then fire from behind a tree (several shots just to be sure). I then edge my way along the picket fence to the church door. And in the entrance I pause for what I will realize later is the most important shot of the day.

Above the door is a painted circle, the only sign, apart from the dioramas back at the interpretive center and a Louis Riel quote on a notice board, of the native Indian half of the Metis` heritage. This round ‘tipi door’, painted on this white frame structure, gives me a sudden insight into the unique reality of the lives of these people of the Prairie from not so long ago, who refused to be put down by the Canadian Government without a struggle. Who so valued their way of life that they would resist a government that the peoples of the Saskatchewan knew had been imposed upon them and was irresponsible in its care of them. They fought well here at Batoche for four days and were finally beaten by a trained army. The reverberations of their resistance are still blowing through the separate graveyards on the prairie wind.

Note. Riel was captured at Batoche, sickened by the killing, and at the end of his trial, before the verdict, before they hanged him as traitor, he asked to make a statement. It was a rambling affair spoken in English. His legal defense had done their best to save him through a plea of insanity and that would not have been difficult to do, but Riel refused that because then all that the ‘half breeds’, as he referred to his people, all that his life and their lives represented and had been given for, would be dismissed as crazy and pointless.

Not an official Canadian hero, then, or for many years thereafter, but a great man of the people nevertheless.

Prairie Town

2011-07-24T21:46:00.000-07:00

Saskatchewan # 5

I have read before we came to visit on the Prairies, of the decline of the small towns as farming changed from family toward mega-farms, transportation routes improved for road vehicles and declined for trains and the traditional grain elevators became redundant. In the little town of Dundurn, Saskatchewan we were to see the effects in action and to glimpse the complexity that lay behind the reports.

Certainly the main-street business buildings had seen better days; cracked sidewalks, peeling paint, closed storefronts. Just down the street though, there was a splendid white church and beyond it an elementary school. Streets of occupied houses, hardly anything for sale. Droves of people turning out for a children`s soccer training session. If we walked around the edges of town, by the railway tracks we could find some rough patches but so we could in any Canadian small town where people worked in trucking and agricultural businesses and gentrification had not waved its magic wand.

The railway tracks looked used even though the nearby highway carried a steady traffic of transport trucks.

That highway was the key to Dundurn`s state of health. Just forty minutes from the city of Saskatoon, it meant that grocery, hardware and the like could not compete with the big box stores not so very distant in highway miles, but it also made this a bedroom community for those interested in cheaper housing at the expense of longer commutes. The nearby military base provided more residents and no doubt there were some retired farmers who had sold out to those neighbours following the trend toward bigger farms. As for that, it is possible now to live a neighbourly life in a small town and drive out to work one`s farm during the growing season.

That disappearing rural life on the prairies we read about ( and in the rest of Canada as well), is not so clear-cut on the ground. People adapt and adjust as do their towns and reports of their demise is premature.

The Church at Stony Creek.

2011-07-11T17:09:00.000-07:00

Saskatchewan # 4

Someone called Halvar Anderson lies here beside his neighbours beneath the prairie soil in this churchyard. These were the first settlers of this area near the South Saskatchewan River. The church itself lies deserted beside its gravel road in the evening light.

Who were these people? We can know in general terms how they ended up here, where they came from and that they happened to die near here and were of this particular Christian denomination but the reality of their individual lives is hidden. All we have are names and dates, but together they form a sample of the great wave of settlement of little more than one hundred years ago that claimed land on the bald prairie.

It was a land rush and a great experiment: - turning the sod of a vast grassland, planting annual crops, frame houses, fenced fields, permanent settlements- on an ecosystem that is grassy because of variable and unpredictable rainfall. Traditionally, all around the world this Steppe landscape has supported small nomadic populations and a lifestyle that followed the seasons and the new grasses and hunted the animals that grazed upon it, or the herded domesticated cattle, sheep and goats. A little agriculture perhaps in sheltered valleys and the harvesting of wild grains. Think of the Steppes of Eurasia, where we Europeans developed our cultural preferences for grains and dairy products and our tendency wherever we go in the world to make fields out of natural woodland, raise cattle, grow grain. Here the experiment was to go the next step and create permanent settlement on a landscape designed by nature for impermanence. To put the whole prairie under cultivation and leave the valleys more or less alone was a major reversal and extreme experiment that would seem to have worked. Here are roads, railway lines, farms and communities. Here is a churchyard with its history carved in stone.

But then, this church is abandoned. Is this a precautionary note? Can we really declare victory just yet or is our confidence based on a couple of lifetimes of experience only and not on the earth`s timetable which stretches over much longer spans of time and climatic changes. How about this dramatic grassland climate that provides too much rain and then not enough, blistering heat, early and late frosts? To make a successful crop can be a struggle now. How about a hundred years of variation, of little or no summer rain? The original grasslands had that experience built into their communities of plants and animals. How well would the present man-made system cope with this guaranteed eventuality?

To imagine this seems ridiculous, everything is so solid, so worked over, we cannot imagine the large balloon after it has popped from one small pinprick. Remember those images from the dirty thirties in the last century: dust storms, abandoned, drifted in farm buildings. Just a few years combining dryer conditions, uncertain rains and a financial system that would not continue to support people on the land. A little bump in the weather and economics being the pinprick for many, setting them moving on like the wind that was blowing their fields away. Imagine the mega-farms we know today, the banks and investors watching the bottom line, pulling the plug on agriculture that could not pay after only a few years into a longer, dryer spell or even more dramatic shifts from year to year as are associated with global warming.. Complexity in our modern world is more vulnerable than those nomadic flexible lifestyles of the past.

We have an example of poor agricultural practice from ancient history. The lands around the Mediterranean were once rich productive lands. The islands of Ancient Greece covered in trees, the desert lands along the north coast of Africa once the breadbasket of Rome. Now the seaport of Troy at the Dardanelles is ten miles inland, its harbour filled up with soil from the grainfields and once wooded hillsides that washed away.

Imagine the grasslands of North America, stripped as they are of their natural blanket of adaptive vegetation becoming dryer, abandoned farms and towns, the soil beginning to blow, forming dunes. The desert climate creeping northward. The tipping point, the permanent conversion of grasslands into desert just as has happened in the past in other places.

Those settlers in the churchyard, they had no concept of this, they cannot be blamed if they were swept up in a great social experiment that nature must surely, and perhaps sooner than we think with global warming, put an end to, but we can think ahead, imagine what we can do to limit the damage, how we can reseed those open soils with natural grassland before it is too late.

Note. While many have tried to recreate a native prairie grassland, the mixed results have shown just how difficult this is. Easy to plow under, but very challenging to re-establish. The deeper into the project, the more complexity, the more variables. The struggle to do this, however, teaches us a lot about the interconnectedness of all things and the shallowness of human understanding. This is a life-form we are attempting to recreate from bits and pieces.

We are aware that when human cultures are rudely interrupted by disease or conquest, as happened to the native people of this same prairie, something is lost and the people who carry the remains of this destroyed culture remain lost in some ways. One does n`t just drop one and pick-up another. This grassland ecosystem, of which that human culture was an adapted part , is vastly more crippled if the major proportion is done away with.

However, just as it is very important that battered cultures rediscover their roots and begin to live again, even in a modified form, so it is important that the Prairie grasslands be helped to recover. If only out of self interest, to prevent a new Sahara which will eat us all up.

The sea breeze at Indian Point.

2011-07-11T16:01:00.000-07:00

Not since early Spring have I walked down the rocky trail to Indian Point. From muddy trails, tiny leaves on many twigs and pendant maple blossoms to a now matured world where the trees and bushes have taken larger form within their leafy clothes and are swaying and chanting in the wind. At my feet the grasses on the rocky slopes have changed from trim green to a soft carpet of waving furry stalks gone to seed.

The sea breeze urges sparkling waves to the shore in an ever repeating pattern of ripples, flows invisibly across the beach and then takes form again in agitated leaves and sighing, bending grasses. The morning light too skims and flashes across the waves, steadies on the rocky beach and then dances and blinks as it presses deeper into the shadows above the shoreline.

This hypnotic steady swish of waves and higher pitched murmur of the wind in leaves and grasses joins the full orchestra of visual instruments. I hear, I feel, I see, I am immersed in this moment. I am aware of being alive, part of this place and time. Part also of the fragrant gusts of sea breeze that breath all to life as they sweep through us here at Indian Point.

Sand Hills.

2011-06-26T17:06:00.000-07:00

Saskatchewan #3

The rolling humps I am walking over are sand hills, and once, during glacial times, they were roving dunes, built and pushed along by powerful winds rushing down off the continental ice sheet. Now they are tamed and held down by a mat of prairie plants, here a remnant of a grassland ecosystem that stretched up the center of North America. Even as I wander with my camera I can see holes where the carpet of plants has been disturbed and the sand released to blow restlessly on the wind once more.

In other places with sand hill landforms the natural grasslands have been plowed up and annual grain crops have taken their place. Planted to follow the contours, with the stubble left after the harvest to hold the fragile sandy soil in place throughout the winter months, now in early Spring we see enormous tractor and discing outfits lightly tilling the stubble under and preparing the ground for another crop. Farther down the road, big sprayers are moving over the enormous fields to kill emergent weeds that will permit a new cash crop without the need for more cultivation. Everything orchestrated to keep that soil where it is and save time and money at the same time A perfect combination!

Here in this unplowed military range area there is no need to ‘make `er pay’. The plant communities in all their complexity have no economic advantage that is easy to see. No grain to feed the world`s hungry, no rows of wonder-bread on the supermarket shelves. No tilling, no sprays, no GM grains either. Just the sound of wind in grasses, the flutter of new poplar leaves and the scream of a hawk. This must have a value beyond the immediately economic. It speaks to us who stand in its midst, of our relationship, to our sense of community with what lives and what strains to move beneath our feet once more. This is our skin, our desires, ourselves, that rolls around me.

Tipis.

2011-06-17T17:48:00.000-07:00

Saskatchewan #2

A modern building echoing the tipi form, a fold in the bald prairie with a stream winding through poplars. We have arrived at a Native Heritage Center just north of Saskatoon and will spend some time walking the trails and have a picnic lunch. The clear blue sky, the sun`s noontime glare and the blustery cool wind tells me that photography might be a little sketchy today. We choose a simple walk on an archeological trail, suitable for the grandchildren, which details the long history of use by native peoples, - a winter shelter down among the poplars out of that cold winter wind. As soon as we too walk downslope we can feel the shelter and begin to take a more detailed interest. Some tipis nestle among the trees beside the stream and I step inside one to find a different light, filtered by the white canvas. A great place to photograph the family! I catch Sarah standing at the entrance in a pool of light.

Those tipis, if I find the right angle and avoid anything in the background that speaks of the present era, have the potential to be ‘historic photos’ with a sepia or B&W version. Fortunately my camera will do this for me right away and this guides me to take several more. I have Curtis`s images from 150 years ago as a creative guide.

We discover some wild flowers on the slopes and I smile to see my photographer daughter following her Dad`s example by placing her camera down on the ground and shooting these prairie flowers up against the blue sky. The results are so effective! I am shooting images today that catch the subtle textures and forms of this early Spring day, so much are still sticks and buds or dry plants from the last summer season. How much more powerful this transition would have felt for those peoples who overwintered here.

The question I am holding in my mind as we walk and take photos is whether my regular habit of careful observation as I take photos is what is making this little fold in the prairie so vivid for me on this day or if there is something about this place, used for thousands of years by First Nations peoples, that is influencing what I see and how I photograph it. I have studied the history and cultures of the plains peoples sometime in the past and that is a real help in understanding the significance of this place. Whatever the mix, this brilliant noon light is working just fine for me today.

At Beaver Creek

2011-06-03T09:28:00.000-07:00

Saskatchewan #1

There`s no way to hold back the future,
but we can shape the course of events by
engaging - fully, deeply, and passionately -
with the present... This approach is
sometimes referred to as a strategy of “No Regrets”,
because the work is worth doing now,
no matter what happens next.
‘Prairie - A Natural History’. by Candace Savage

The South Saskatchewan River surges across the prairie in a broad Spring flow, scarcely contained by its banks. All across the flat lands are sheets of water slowly being drained away by a myriad of little creeks. Beaver Creek is a good example: starting in farmland, winding through the sand hills of an army range and finally cutting deeper into the valley sides of the big river itself and adding its jot to the common flow. Imagine a very large quilt, a patchwork of fields and hills, with the quilting stitches being the creeks.

A few days ago I canoed a section of the upper reaches; a strong even flow contained by built-up banks: mallards looking for nesting sites, coyotes and hawks looking for mallards, willows, tall yellowed reeds with fluffy tops waving in the wind, river bank beavers. Now I am twenty minutes drive away from there and near the place where the creek will end its course in the big river. Here the creek winds within its canyon, remnant snow drifts lie in shady spots, a mass of deciduous trees and bushes beside the creek - new buds just breaking -, and slopes of native plants reaching to the prairie above.

This place is a conservation area complete with an interpretive center. The land was a gift long ago of an early settler who farsightedly realized that something was being lost as he and many others plowed up the natural vegetation. It must have helped his decision that this little corner of his land was sandy and cut up into steep slopes. Whatever it took, here is preserved a little piece of a natural grassland that used to stretch for thousands of miles up the center of North America. Those plants that seem so ordinary, those grasses and scrubby trees, are an ecosystem: an assembly of plants adapted over a very long period of time to prairie conditions. Not only that, they are adjusted to this particular place and even to differences in soil, moisture and whether they lie on a north or south facing slope. This place has an individual`s face.

What I am learning today is that once one has gazed his fill on far horizons and spectacular skies it is what lies hidden at his feet that needs to become his consuming interest. It is here, down in this little valley beside Beaver Creek, that the real lessons begin if we are to begin to understand the land and our place within it.

Maria Mahoi and Russell Island

2011-05-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

The first of the sun`s rays catches the masts of yachts anchored in the shelter of the still, shadowy silhouette of Russell Island. It is the first bright note of a new summer`s day. This little 40 acre island, tucked into the arms of Fulford Harbour on Saltspring Island, is a small part of a national marine park in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia. What makes it large in historical terms is due to the many years at the beginning of the last century when it was home to a powerful woman: Maria Mahoi, and her family.

It is an obvious but often neglected fact that everything, not just the big ticket items like cities and political personalities, contributes to the story of a place. This island and its people were part of the larger history of BC, their lives more important for us today than we might think. Russell Island obviously was not always called by its present name, that is an artifact of mapping and settlement by Europeans. Perhaps its First Nations name related to the food resources to be found or perhaps its silhouette was noted to resemble some supernatural being. It is here in BC`s frontier interface between the previous stewards of the land and the newcomers that we find Maria (pronounced Ma-rye-ah) Mahoi living her life, and in her genes was a blend of the old and the new.

Her island seems somehow taller this morning, its brown sandstone slopes and cliffs turn a seaweedy olive green for the last three meters before they slide demurely beneath the surface. The white beaches, made of thousands of ground up seashells, stretch down to green ribbons of sea lettuce that stir gently in the morning calm. Clams spout into the air after a long night asleep under the blanket of the sea. The tide is out, but already rising again. By noon the island will still be afloat but will then seem more deeply laden with it`s freight of trees, rocks and history.

If we paddle ashore, quietly, so as not to disturb the still sleeping people in their boats, we will beach our canoe on the shell beach at the southern tip and walk along a trail that leads east past rocky headlands and stunted pine trees. In winter this exposed side of the island takes the full force and salt spray of the south-east gales. A rowboat, scarcely visible in the reflected glare of the sun, is fishing on an offshore reef. Beyond, we look out towards Portland Island with its beacon on Kanaka Bluff. Oops, just wait a second for the ferry to pass. Ah there it is! In the far distance the blue humps of more islands rising out of the sea are in the United States. Not so long ago, historically speaking, there was no Canada, no United States, no boundary, except those flexible tribal boundaries that existed in the Salish Sea. Even after all that territory was parceled up and divided off, it was easy one hundred years ago to slide back and forth in a small boat. It is only slightly more difficult today.

The trail is littered with fallen arbutus leaves that crackle underfoot. Dry bleached grasses splay across thin soil atop sandstone cliffs, while the rocks below cradle drift logs above the ferry traffic`s intermittent surf. All except the ferries and the beacon seems as it was in Maria`s day. Looking back into the center of the island, there is a dense screen of same-age trees. This would have been a field in Maria`s time. The great trunk of a Douglas Fir vanishes upward though the canopy. It was a large tree then too - a landmark to use while gliding home on a late evening after visiting with friends and relatives on Saltspring or over on Portland.

Our path winds along the low cliffs and as we become accustomed to the island, as our feet adjust to stepping over sandstone boulders and fallen branches, our senses tune in to the combined smells of dry vegetation and sea weed, the patterns of light and shadow cast by the slanting sunlight. Yes, we can hear the ferry rumbling across the water and the drone of the first float plane of the day, but there are also more subtle communications: an eagle flaps along just over our heads, screaming to its mate perched in an arbutus that hangs precariously over the sea; an otter family at the water`s edge below us squabbles over a breakfast of something cold and slippery just now carried up from the depths. This is a brilliant natural world in sharp focus. How much more rich it must have been in the past.

Now, having crossed to the lee side of Russell through waist high salal, we follow a boardwalk across what will be a swampy area during the winter. The trees that arch across our path are fruit trees gone wild. This would once have been a trim and tidy orchard, rather wet in winter and needing drainage ditches, but retaining ground water for the trees during the long dry summers. Here is her house by the western shore. It is a modest, white clapboard building with a water tower standing behind it. Now we can really feel her presence. Perhaps there is some truth to the belief that people and landscape who have had a close relationship in the past continue that relationship into the present. The fact that Maria was of mixed ancestry, part Indian and part Hawaiian, would help explain it: no European scientific disbelief in spirits to block what comes naturally.

Hawaiian? It seems an unusual connection. We usually think of Hawaii as being flooded out by other races. Once we remember that, however, it would not be such a stretch to imagine that this pressure encouraged some native Hawaiians, during their own troubles in the cultural contact period, to seek a life far from home. And they did, often as crewmen on whaling ships or brought here as employees of the Hudson`s Bay Company in the fur trade. Those who landed in what would later become the US also migrated north from the newly created American gulf islands to a place where they were counted as landowning, regular voting citizens. Many settled in the nearby Gulf Islands, marrying native Indian women, as did many European men during the frontier period. It was not exactly coral beaches and palm trees, but here were islands in a mild climate, land was for the taking, and most importantly, there was a community. Maria was a child of this flexible frontier landscape. She, with her large family, went on to be an important element in the history of British Columbia. On little Russell Island.

The island seems an idyllic place to live now. How many millions of dollars would it fetch from a wealthy family bent on establishing an exclusive estate? In Maria`s day, a century ago, it would have been a hardscrabble sort of place, passed over by other settlers looking to farm on good land. For a people who could live off the land and sea, however, it was in the midst of plenty. The beaches produced clams and oysters, there were fish of all types in the surrounding sea and one could shoot wildfowl around the shores and also deer on neighbouring Saltspring Island. There was plenty of fresh water in the winter rainy season and during the hot dry summers, when the two shallow wells dried up, drinking water could be hauled by rowboat from a spring just fifteen minutes away at Indian Point. There was no electricity on the island of course, but everyone on the islands used coal oil lamps anyway, and strong bodies and hand tools did the work.

The people at the south end of Saltspring and the nearby islands did not aspire to luxury as we know it today. They lived in harmony with the land. The family did have to earn and spend money to some extent to buy flour, sugar, coal oil, tools and clothes that could not be made or endlessly repaired. Strawberries were grown on the island and along with wild berries were gathered and sold locally; clams and fish could be carried off to sell in Sydney, some ten miles away by rowboat. Wool from their sheep was sold or traded to native spinners. It must have been a steady business just living, visiting with relatives and friends, raising children. The years slipped by; sailboats and steamships were replaced by gas boats and the frontier openness slowly congealed into more rigid class structures as the colony filled with more Europeans and their imported wives. Soon southern Vancouver Island was ‘more British than the British’ and ‘Kanakas’ like Maria were looked down upon as unfortunate artifacts from the frontier period by white settlers, themselves scrambling up the economic and social ladder. Russell Island continued to be her fortress and refuge as the tides of change swept past its shores, but I imagine that she was too busy living her competent life to feel second class.

Maria was a strong swimmer and natural sailor. The sea beyond the house that is now reflecting the morning sunshine would once have echoed with the sound of her children`s laughter instead of the murmur from the present day yachts. It is not difficult today after this walk on Russell Island to imagine Maria sailing her sixteen foot clinker built rowboat skillfully through the yachts on the morning breeze. Perhaps we even glimpsed her earlier, fishing out off the eastern shore and maybe she has some fine rockfish with which to make a special dish. She lives on within the blood and bones of this place.

These self-reliant skills of hers provided for her family and reached out into her community; she may have been illiterate but she was the local midwife, well respected by her neighbours, known to be a hard worker and caring wife and mother. She was a tough, able woman in a era when there was no government social safety net for families that stumbled into hard times. Husbands often worked far away from the family for months at a time in the fishing and logging industries and sometimes forgot to come home at all. Deadly accidents also took them off permanently. Only a strong will and back, and knowledge about a thousand things to do with survival on this little island provided a safety line against disaster for Maria.

Outside of her island and community, up and down the coast of BC, people of all races and persuasions were living similar self-reliant lives. They all valued a sense of community much more highly than we do today and kept it in good repair. This is what makes Maria Mahoi more that simply a remarkable island woman. She stands for all those women of the coast who fought for life, raised their families and created the warp of a thousand threads into which their children and children`s children would later weave their own lives.

Now it is time to carry the canoe back down to the rising water`s edge, push off and paddle away from Russell Island. We look back over our shoulders and try to understand all that we have seen on this little sandstone island in the Salish Sea. Maria`s life here is important because on islands we can see patterns in microcosm that are easy to miss within larger landscapes and populations. She exemplifies a life of both competence and restraint, living skillfully within the capacity of the island`s resources to sustain herself and her family. She visualized her world as having a spirit, of which she was a part, that extended beyond her island shores and which constantly renewed itself. Her way of life was the opposite of today`s, where individuals buy nearly all they need and grow or harvest little. Our present economic world view, that is based on continual over-exploitation of all the world`s resources, would find her to be a less than model citizen. She carried into the beginning of our modern era her Hawaiian and Indian ancestors` concepts of being an integral part of and careful stewards of the land. Maria and her island, at this moment in our history, has some especially important lessons for us all.

Learned filters and the Zen of picture making.

2011-04-29T11:52:00.000-07:00

I am teaching a course in ‘composition’ for my camera club these days and while I have no idea how effective this is for the other members yet, - any positive results will take a while to show up -, I do know that this focus is doing good things for my own creativity. Typically, the teacher who first must synthesis and then lead others to do the same is the primary learner.

There are some difficult considerations of course, the main one being that people are used to being spoon fed from childhood on, - we break down learning into bite sized portions, provide simple rules and guidelines and assume a stepped learning ladder. I have always taught from a different perspective. - that complex thinking like that which goes into creative work does not lend itself to simplification. It is not the sum of its parts and to pretend that it is makes for a whole bunch of minds who think they know but really have missed the boat. So, the learning process for photography as usually presented actually leads down a wrong path, away from creativity and blocks individual thought. Creativity is a complex and intuitive form of thinking that does not work well with ‘how-to’ lessons.

I have always taught from the perspective that individuals are their own best teachers. A thoughtful learner who finds things out for himself, takes nothing as given, questions everything and experiments endlessly, is more likely to produce original work and advance thought and ideas for his culture as a whole. Photography has such potential for fresh seeing, but is loaded down with standards. We are lead to believe that there are desirable models,‘good images’, that we should emulate. That beauty is synonymous with ‘pretty’ rather than with ‘truth’. That good images are those that sell and are hung on living room walls. A consumer society and its art.

We all see the world through ‘filters’ of various sorts. We drive down the road, while thinking of personal concerns. We barely see the traffic, never mind the way a cloud looks on the horizon. When we go out especially to photograph a landscape, we may see the cloud but use a standard compositional device, one of a few that we apply to all our picture making, to incorporate it into our photograph. The more professional we become, the more the cords of convention and habit bind us up. The challenge must be to peer so closely at our subject that what comes into our camera is the expression of what is and comes from the subject itself. No rules or conventions, no filters between us and the subject. That requires a zen-like mind and a willingness to be misunderstood. An individual path.

In fact, the camera and its images that are harvested in this way become a tool for personal growth. We look closely to make our photographs and the whole world opens for us in a completely fresh way. Making pictures becomes effortless and filterless. Our subjects reach up, organize themselves, and rush into the camera. They are us in a very deep sense.

So, given all that, how does one teach from this perspective? I introduce the elements that are present in some combination or other in the world around us. If we take a photograph, they are there. Things like texture, line, form, colour, point, rhythm, and value. The basic building blocks. My interest, however, is in their relationships, how they work together to communicate whatever it is that they are ‘saying’. I expect my fellow photographers to take it from there and teach themselves by constantly looking clearly at the world around them and also referring to their own recent images as a guide toward the creation of their future ones, - ‘where is my next step?’

If we spend time looking from this perspective, then the cloud is not just a cloud, a white puffy thing, neither is it a simply a form in itself. It exists in relationship with everything else, glides over fields and mountains, sifts through trees and when we enter into its foggy breath and know it, then our chances are greater that we will have something in our mind and in our camera that communicates ‘cloudliness’. A fuzzy subject, its true.

The person with the camera then, needs to step past all those learned filters, those rules of composition, and simply open himself wide enough so that the ‘subject’ can express itself. We must be in relationship and practice that state of mind. It doesn`t matter if our images seem to lack structure at first, that they stray from the ‘rules’. We are breaking out of convention, making our own trail in the forest. Or, as we will begin to suspect, the trail is creating itself in front of our feet.

Composition and reality

2011-04-29T11:26:00.000-07:00

When we were sailing through the Pacific it was an exciting moment when a new island appeared on the horizon after many days at sea. First the highest peak, then the bare or forested slopes and finally the flash of surf on the encircling coral reef. As we followed the reef`s edge to find the pass that would allow us safely into the lagoon we feasted our eyes on this new landfall. We never thought to say that this really was not perfect; that the mountain should be higher, the lagoon greener and that the palms on the little islands at the pass entrance could be taller or more neatly arranged. No such judgements as we stared with hungry eyes on LAND! One simply viewed natural reality and accepted it as it was.

When we look at a photograph of ‘reality’, do we use the same criteria or do we apply a series of filters, - expectations and judgements -, that stop us from really seeing it as it is? For example in the first photo of trees one could simply accept nature`s placement and concentrate on seeing it as we viewed the islands, or we could place some screens of judgement before it and by doing that miss seeing its reality at all. The trees are too evenly spaced, we might say, or it is much too dark, or apply whatever theory of composition we espouse. The second image of a lone tree and power lines is definitely stripped down to some bare essentials and a lot hinges on very little. Perhaps one might find problems with the exact placement of the elements, (“That tree should be definitely at the ‘thirds’ position”) One might miss the tension between lines and tree and cry out that powerlines are so ugly and miss the contrast that I saw when I looked up at that moment. Of course, they are a reminder of our power, our rigid grasp on the natural world, and isn`t the tree more noticeable, more fragile and more beautiful as a result?

The reality is that both nature and photos exist within their own particular set of relationships and we must see them as unique with their own individual standards. They are as they are and our efforts should go towards trying to see and understand them as clearly as possible. Our limited understanding is restricted even more by standards and judgements. That island we see with eager eyes, no judgements please, just get us through that pass and safely into the heart of this place.

Arbutus Woman.

2011-04-21T19:19:00.000-07:00

The thick branch stretches out over the rocky cliff and shore towards the ocean surface. This is a common gesture for arbutus trees along these shores as they lean flexibly out beyond the more rigid firs to reach the light. I step to the edge of the cliff, lean into the branch and take a photo right down its length. Even as I do this I know that I am drawn to make this picture by the swelling breast and its nipple that is close to my face.

The Salish First Nations people have always seen the relationship between arbutus trees and women, either in stories of how a girl was changed into this tree or in a more general way of seeing the possibility of transformation between animate and inanimate and between human and the rest of creation. It is an easy transition to make. Who has not run their hands over the smooth skin of new bark, seen the breasts where the tree has grown out to cover a broken branch, or noticed a crotch`s curly last year`s rough bark where branch meets trunk. It is so obvious and startling that to turn ones eyes and mind firmly away takes serious self control. To not visit that place in one`s imagination risks creating a habit of mind that will shut out creative thought as well. Because our imagination and creativity are intimately tied to the feminine.

We still refer to ‘the muses’ when we try to name the wellspring of our creative thought. They were the female gods of ancient Greece who mediated between humans and Apollo, - the source of light and knowledge. We get our inspiration ( receive the spirit) via the female principle,- the creator of life. If I repress the female qualities I see in the arbutus, I also limit my free access to the muse, imagination, creativity, and to art.

The Cemetery.

2011-04-18T21:14:00.000-07:00

I have an hour available before the ferry will arrive in Fulford Harbour bringing my wife Heather home from a day looking after a grandchild across the water. From the stone church, at the head of the bay, I can watch for the ferry and spend some time taking photographs.

The gravestones are my objective today. This is an old church, by BC standards, and the graveyard gives a snapshot of the people of the south-end who built it. Fascinating stuff for me and my camera. While the tide is far out in the bay below and the sun flashes out between grey clouds providing lots of other subject matter, which I will get to later, right now I will simply try to do justice to these gravestones and their history of Saltspring Island.

This does not call on any great technical knowledge or special lens but it does require that I look carefully and with respect. This is a form of anthropology, of documentation, but also a way to improve my own mental attitude. Good photographs come from careful observation and good observation is more than simply technical. It requires a form of empathy as I take these photographs that will permit me today to feel kinship with these folk long beneath the sod.

Japanese lessons. "It is Nature"

2011-04-08T13:05:00.000-07:00

I drive down a half hour early to pick Heather off the late afternoon ferry so I can take some photographs in the cemetery of the little stone church that lies at the head of Fulford Harbour. Built well over a century ago by the then new inhabitants of the south end of the island, it is now their eternal resting place, and it is this sense of continuity that I find attractive. That and the interest of the stones and their inscriptions that show the diversity of the population in those early days. Hawaiians, Irish, German, British and Indians still lie in close relationship in the churchyard.

The ferry is still far out in the bay as I finish my project so I decide to cross the road and photograph the shoreline. The tide is out and here in the estuary where the creeks spill their loads of sand and gravel a broad temporary landscape of twisting channels carries the rushing Spring runoff waters to the sea. The sun dodges in and out of racing clouds and the wet beach alternately glows and greys in rushing shadows. In all this almost monochrome world it is the red jacket of a lone figure on a rocky point that catches my interest. I scramble down the brambly bank and say hello. When she turns I see she is a young Japanese woman. When I have offered to and taken her photo on her own camera and asked for and taken a couple on mine we start to talk.

She is Aki, and has been on Saltspring for two months as a ‘woofer’, - a volunteer farm labourer. I express my sympathy for the recent earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident that has happened in her country while she is so far from home and am struck by her reply. She lives on the other side of Honshu and her town and relatives were not affected, she tells me. I grasp an important attitude here that sets me straight. No wringing of hands, no riding the coat tails of emotion here, just an understanding that “It is nature.”she says, “We live always on the edge.” A clarity and acceptance that lies outside of shallow emotion, that accepts thousands dead as part of living on a lively planet. We shake hands and I clamber back up the bank while she walks on the beach beside the rushing stream. The ferry is just docking, it is time for me to go, but I glance one last time down toward her small figure squatting now in the reflected rays of the late afternoon sun. I take some last photos of her beside the river on the bare sandy shore and head for the van.

That sense of eternity, of continuity, that I had in the churchyard, how do I reconcile that with my conversation by the sea? We do live on a violent planet, nothing is certain at all. Is there something in a very Japanese way of looking at things that I can relate to here? I had recognized that young woman`s quiet knowledge within myself as well. Something that was so strong within me while sailing back and forth across the Pacific. So hard to adjust to at first, and yet such a powerful way of understanding the world. The earth, its shrugs, its storms the shifting of light and shadow, the turn of the tide and the rushing streams are part of eternity and we are a fragile part of it too. A shallow emotion of tears and agonizing sympathy is not useful here, not appropriate. She has it right, after all.

Rock 2. The Granite Basement.

2011-03-31T20:56:00.000-07:00

If I take the right-hand trail at Burgoyne Bay it leads me along the mountainside at the foot of Mt. Maxwell. Its sandstone and conglomerate cliffs are hard to see when I look up the steep slope through the trees. Below, the ocean surface at the base of the mountain glitters through the solemn ranks of tree trunks. To emphasize my littleness in this giant landscape, large boulders ( some as big as houses) rest above me. They brace their feet deeply among the roots, with their heads raised bare amid the tree tops. All is grave and silent as I walk briskly by, trying not to heed a sense of being inspected, weighed, and found wanting.

At the end of the trail I reach a more open space; grass, moss covered rocks, Garry oaks, and the ocean which flashes in the sun or darkens again as a cloud brings a quick shower. Open sky at last! I begin to photograph a world that seems more made for me and my kind. From here I can see the cliffs above the tree tops catching scarves of cloud. They are a little less threatening from this angle and I feel the oppressive atmosphere of the trail behind me dissipate. I walk down a steep bank and out onto a smooth granite point.

Granite: white and grey with little black dots, hard as hard, here, below a thousand feet of sedimentary layers. It must form the floor of the deep inlet, with only this thin layer of steep shoreline showing that it underlies all those towering cliffs. The open light has fooled me: this steep shore is older still by countless millions of years and I am a little fly that crawls upon its face for an instant and is gone. I begin to make images of this eternal place. The glacier smoothed form I stand on, the black boulder at the tide line that, like me, has come from somewhere else and will be ground down and turned to sand while the granite will gain only another wrinkle.

This feeling of insignificance, of being a mere sparkle of light, a grain in the sands of time, is hard to shake. Yet, it is my photographing and my sense of relatedness to all this that brings me through to another place of understanding. There is no judgement anywhere here, no being found wanting. The key lies in my feeling for this landscape. I feel empathy for these trees, these beetling cliffs and giant boulders. Who is to say they do not grasp that with fierce intensity. A little flash that lights them up and says “ I see you. I make your image with reverence and care. We are in relationship, you and I.”

Rock 1. How beautiful upon the mountain.

2011-03-25T09:21:00.000-07:00

In the fields at Burgoyne Bay is a rock. Large, smooth and grey, surrounded by green grass, it is a glacial erratic, tumbled smooth by the ice of 10,000 years ago as it was carried from who knows where and finally deeply deposited here in the valley. Through time and erosion it has barely reached the surface again.

On a day of sun and cloud, of rushing streams and soaring eagles, I walk past, see the sun upon the rock and walk squelchingly across the sodden field to take its portrait. With its gently rounded forms I need definite directional lighting to bring it to life. To life? It is true that I tend to find personality within ‘inanimate’ nature. So much more real to relate to a world that has face, shoulders, hips and feet. This ‘transformational’ rock pulls me forward into its spell and I start to take photos. I hold the camera at ground level and line up the rock against that other great rock, the hump of Mt. Maxwell that dominates the valley, and photograph their related forms, their similarities.

Quickly, while the burst of sunlight lasts, I circle my subject finding the flanks, the buttock curves, the cloven, shadowy places. How beautiful it is. I carefully climb all four feet to its summit, balance precariously and feel the bulk of this rock that, like an iceberg, keeps its own balance by the mass that lies below the surface. Once here however, there is nothing I can include in the picture frame that, directed downwards, does not include my own wet rubber boots. Alright, I think and bend over at the waist, widen the lens and snap the universe of rock, boots and our joint projected shadow upon the field. A funny, awkward photo. “ How beautiful upon the mountain...” comes to me as I smile to see my own shadow combined with that of the rock.

But really, is this not what I have been photographing? The rock, the sunlight, and my relationship within all of this landscape. Just as winter gives way to Spring.

Walking at Beaver Point 2. Wind storm.

2011-03-14T09:10:00.000-07:00

For the past 24 hours we have been warned of a gale approaching our coast. “ Up to and even over 100 k.” the radio warns, and we prepare for ferry cancellations and worry about some of our big trees smashing down on our roofs. I deliver Heather to the morning ferry for her day tending little Clara just as the south-eater begins to build. Back home, I complete a computer task quickly and shut it down just before the power fails. Full daylight now, and I can see the trees bending and swaying in the gusts. Bits of branches fly downwind. I listen for the nasty crash of falling trees.

I feel trapped inside the house with nothing to do but wait. This is not my best scenario and I begin to imagine what it must be like down at Beaver Point, - the wind, the waves, the rushing clouds and slashing squalls of rain. Oh boy! The wind drops. Blue sky. Quick, time to get down to the sea before the expected shift of wind to the west! It begins again with greater fury even as I walk down the road toward the point. I am acutely aware that I have no hard hat on as I walk warily through the trees with my eyes cast upward to catch the first sight of a flying branch. I`ve been hit before by even small branches and taken surprisingly hard knocks! The roar of the wind in the trees in all pervading.

I duck under the recently fallen trunk of a good sized fir tree and step out onto the great stony finger of the Point itself. Free from trees, out in the open, just the solid strength of the gale pressing against me. Leaning into it, I carry the camera protectively to keep the raindrops off that zip by sideways from the line of low wet clouds. The new set of waves are busy cancelling out the first wave pattern and slop and crash onto the rocks. Rain, sunshine, clouds, all in rapid succession. A splendid rainbow. Dark wet shores, brilliant greens. White surf and mottled white backwash. I could take photos faster if I didn`t have to wipe raindrops off the protective glass filter on the lens so often.

I retrace my steps of a week ago in reverse this time. Along the shore, around the corner and deeper into the bay . I am back into trees that top the cliffs and face into the teeth of the wind. By the time I am back under the big trees at the head of the bay there is another massive rain-squall; dark grey sky, black bending trees and the groans and crashes of pressured trunks and falling branches scarce heard above the roar of the wind. I scurry along, snapping as I go until I reach the farm buildings and sunshine again . The back of the squall cloud rushes across the fields, over the hills and out of sight. Oh boy oh boy, have I got some great photos this time. Well worth the risk!

Walking at Beaver Point. 1. Light and shadow

2011-03-09T11:51:00.000-08:00

Beaver Point

Saltspring Island is an amalgam of three separate islands that were squished together as they were carried on the Pacific plate from farther south and smeared onto the continent of North America. All a long time ago, even in geological terms, but the island still shows this in its many deep bays and prominent headlands. Beaver Point, in Ruckle Provincial Park, is one of these headlands with Ganges and Fulford Harbours on either side. It is just down the road from where we live. A familiar place, where I worked as a Park Ranger for many years. During a recent cold snap I went walking and photographing along the rocky shores.

Cold weather for us on the coast means frigid continental air has flooded out across the strait and holds the Pacific systems at bay for a while. Brilliant sun, blue skies and a bitter north wind. Photographing in these conditions involves harsh light, reflections off the sea and black shadows. No point in trying to avoid this light, better to use it to best advantage. The camera does not have anything like the capacity that the human eye has to handle this extreme range between dark and light. I must expose for the light areas and accept dark impenetrable shadows. I must look too for elements within the landscape that will show this to advantage.

I walk past the field of sheep with their new lambs and head directly for the sea shore. Ahead, through the black silhouettes of the trees, the sun reflects off the choppy sea. All is brilliant blue and silver dancing light. While I take my photographs, it is the shadows that are calling to me. Even as one light-drenched image after another pops into the camera, - rocky shores, arbutus trunks, frozen fresh water seeps and flashing waves - , I keep stopping to make images with those powerful intrusive shadows. These are not necessarily the prettiest images, - there is something vaguely threatening about them -, but it is these that are influencing me today. My last photo as I walk the road up the hill and out of the park again is of the curve of road, with its yellow line and a small slice of grassy verge. Across the road are cast the soft shadows of tree tops. Soft, because the trees are high up and they cast out-of-focus darker grey patterns on the grey road surface. I walked through this pattern on my way down the hill an hour and a half before, but it is only now after my shadow training that I can see this subtle thing. A great photo? Well, it is almost nothing at all really, perhaps only me and another shadow specialist will grasp what is happening here, at this moment, on a cold, bright, winter`s day.

Raft people #3. Ice sailing.

2011-03-01T17:44:00.000-08:00

After restocking while their raft was docked in a narrow channel in the ice, the weather turned bitterly cold. The crew spent most of their time in the insulated, (a padded canvas wraparound), and heated cabin. They soon realized however that they would be frozen into the ice for a long time because the water was freezing all around them. After an immense effort using block and tackle they slid the raft up onto the rapidly thickening ice. The metal keels beneath the raft made this easier and after an uneasy night in the cabin feeling the raft stir beneath them in the blustery gale they realized that after a few more days to let the ice thicken up they could hoist sail and set off downwind, sliding on the metal blades of the keels.

The wind held, it stayed very cold, and one morning they levered the raft around to the direction they wished to travel, hoisted the bateau onto the foredeck, unfurled the sail, and...sat there. The blades had stuck to the ice. More levering and rocking and suddenly the raft began to sail. It was a mad scramble to get aboard, and the raft began to move so much faster than they had ever experienced on water. Try as they might the steering oar made scant difference to direction. They were on a fast, one way, undirected flight across the snow covered ice. Bumpy! I should say!

Far from shore, rocketing along on the slick pebbled surface, swept up in a snowstorm it was a time for the crew to be terrified at what they had initiated, or terrifically exhilarated. What lay ahead? This was once again all new waters they were sailing on. “No, Ice!” they said. As the unusual rattling voyage went on and on it eventually became normal and, as no imminent disaster loomed ahead, they became swept up in their adventure.

Far from land, hour after hour, the raft hurtled along, within the small circle of visibility in the blizzard. The lookout screamed a warning as the raft brushed against a stalk of bullrush, crashed over some leaves frozen into the ice, slowed down and finally came to rest partially tilted in a harbour of leaves. The crew were dismayed for a moment and then realized that they had made a soft landing after all and were safe from further harm. Where there were rushes there must be land nearby and running at top speed into a frozen cliff would have been a disaster. Thanks to the Gods!

A Rat Tale: Taking this land.

2011-02-26T18:09:00.000-08:00

The first ones advanced cautiously, sniffing the wind that rolled over the seedy grasses high above their heads, but they were followed by a confident multitude that advanced like the tide. Across the grassy meadows, over the forested mountains and like a floating furry carpet they swam the streams, lakes and rivers. The wildlife fled or was swarmed and eaten to the bone. Then the bones too were gnawed to emerge later as sparkling white droppings. The rats did stop often to reproduce but as a mass they just kept on rolling along. It was a wide and wild land but it went down before their flood like grass before a scythe. The trees too were consumed: their roots were undermined by the tunnels that riddled the soil or were chewed from the bottom up until they fell. That pace of destruction could not go on for long.

When the only food left was other rat protein, the army fell to warring on itself: starvation, madness and then finally their flea close-companions passed on the plague. The land lay totally stripped of vegetation and covered with a rotting mass of corpses. There were no survivors.

The winds blew a hot fetid breath over the land. Deluges eroded the pocked soil, eroded the unprotected hilltops down to their rocky bones and filled the valleys with sand. A long time passed. Winds, rivers, migrating birds that dared to rest, brought the first seeds. It must have been like this when the glaciers receded at last and a green carpet crept once again northward. The landscape could not be as it had been pre-rat, but once again trees rustled along the river banks, fish filled the waters and waving grasses clothed the naked uplands.

The next ones advanced cautiously across the grasslands on horseback, weapons at the ready for danger in this new world they had discovered. Back behind them, the great wagons rolled confidently forward bringing the rest of the tribe, the herds of cattle, flocks of sheep and goats. This time it was the wain-rider`s turn to be taking this land. The only danger here was themselves.

The raft adventures 2 Winter food gathering.

2011-02-16T09:05:00.000-08:00

It has been a little frosty of late and the pond has a skim of ice. The raft (!), I think, and prepare it for a winter adventure. The crew need some hooded garments, the cabin must be insulated and have a stove. Once again I wish to capture them in action, this time in a wintertime activity near their raft. They can walk on ice, the raft can be pulled into an ice choked lead in the ice and they will be hunting and gathering to resupply their ship. The winter cold will preserve their meat. Some of it is fish, drying on a line between the masts and some more butchered cuts are being pushed and pulled across the slick ice surface in the multipurpose bateau. One figure chops up meat into smaller pieces on the bloody ice while another carries some aboard the raft. Perhaps this will be sliced thin and freeze-dried in the winter wind. A plume of wood smoke rises in the almost calm air. All is purposeful activity, except, look, in the stern of the bateau is a young seal who has been rescued from the larder. The crew will enjoy this creature as a companion. It will be trained to carry a line ashore, to catch fish and who knows what else it may volunteer for. As a pet it has much to recommend it; takes itself for a swim, feeds itself and, hopefully, will learn not to mess on the decks.

The Fifth Child. How place in the family influences one`s personality and role in life

2011-02-10T20:46:00.000-08:00

I am the last of five children in my family, - by a long shot. I am an ‘accident’ and that tail-end-Charlie place has influenced my life and personality. I recognize myself in my siblings and in my parents, to some degree, but it is very much as if we have the same genetic notes but each of us has played them differently. By the time I was born in wartime England, the family dynamic was already well established. There were leaders, followers, youngest. And then, later, me, the survivor of identical twins. I was a passenger and the rest were crew.

If one has no real function in the family dynamic it is natural to turn away, to become independent of social hierarchies and view the world as an observer. Natural too to always be a little unsure of the whole complex of social roles that are learned within family life. One can understand everyone else`s passionate viewpoint but still be far removed from the hurly burly.

Being a passenger left me able to choose my own direction and interests, although without the family pattern to follow, finding my own way was pretty directionless at first. I always had an interest in art for example, but there was no understanding of that quality in the family. It was as if no one else wanted that role so I was free to take it if I must. All the regular and serious jobs were already assigned. I was free, but alone.

If one is like Pluto, circling way out there, far from the center, one has a splendid view of the whole planetary system in one direction but one is also free to look out into the galaxy and view the heavens as well. A larger view of things is built into my position. I have specialized in thinking outside the system.

I`m obviously not a joiner of organizations that expect acceptance of a set of beliefs. I may be interested in systems of thought but am always pointing out alternate ways of understanding, - pulling disparate ideas together and showing their similarities, their function. I am a reader and researcher and a creative thinker in general as well as in the arts. Not many people do this so there is a role for me to express the creative idea. Even way out here on the margins of the solar system I have chosen my role to play.

The best thing to happen for me was to marry and raise a family. What I missed in my birth family I could gain within a new one. A central part of a team, a breadwinner, a supporter of others. A rounding out and fulfilling of otherwise missed opportunities. Not a leader within relationship, that would be expecting a bit much of Pluto, but instead, a team player. In fact, I was the representative of my family of origin and could be my whole crew of siblings.

All those adventures we have gone on, working in foreign lands and sailing the seas. That fits so nicely with a viewer of the heavens. Already turned outward, it is a simple step to travel there. New peoples with new patterns of thought, new lands like distant galaxies to travel to. Those long sailing voyages so like wanderings through space between the stars.

So in the end I am happy to have been the last in line, to be who I have become. To be still becoming, because creative people never stop creating themselves.

The raft adventures 1: Model making and photography.

2011-02-06T20:06:00.000-08:00

Last week I got busy in my workshop and built a model raft that turned out to look quite like the Kon tiki, Thor Heyerdahl`s famous raft that he sailed from Peru to Polynesia and showed the seaworthiness of a wash-through design where the logs supported the load platform and allowed any waves that came on board to simply disappear down the cracks. I even built a flat bottomed bateau for it and peopled the raft with a crew who stood less than a finger high and were made from some moldable wax based clay. That was just the first stage of preparations for a photographic project I have been thinking about for some time.

Last year I made a paper canoe and two paper cut-out paddlers and photographed them as they ran the rapids in my little stream. Obviously cut outs, they never-the-less caught the imagination of many people. Minds were not tied to reality it seemed and in fact related to pretend figures more easily than to simple reality. That should not really have come as a surprise; all the arts work on this principle, after all.

I varnished the finished raft to keep it waterproof and got Heather to sew some simple sails and then, impatient to begin, placed it and its first two figures on a blue, crumpled-up sleeping bag to simulate the ocean and began to photograph it from all angles and in different lighting. Even in their raw, unmodified state the images I made on my new little Samsung T 70 were impressive. I now had a much more three dimensional craft to work with and more fully rounded characters to put into action. The moldable clay allowed the figures to be twisted and altered into a variety of poses. The raft was too large ( about 20 inches long) to cruise down the creek but the brimming pond afforded a large body of water and some interesting shorelines to explore. The next afternoon, with two more characters joining the crew, the raft set sail ( and it could really sail) on the calm and sometimes rippled surface of the pond. I began to photograph it.

Sure enough, as it sailed into the bull-rushes and I photographed it from above it did look like the model it was, but what interested me was that when it approached shore and I held the camera at water level, just as with the canoe series, the sense of smallness and model-ness receded. When I put a crew member in the bateau dinghy and she set out to tow a mooring line to shore the effect was increased. The little characters were no longer idle passengers but took on roles and reality. Close-up, they were still roughly hewn, but that did not matter, or more accurately it seemed just right. Model people on a model raft going about their real lives.

The next step was to ‘photo-shop’ some action into the still fairly static images. The raft needed to create a wake, the waves must leap and splash, cabin lights must cast their golden glow in the star filled night. The woman towing the mooring line ashore must be seen to be paddling hard and foaming along in the raft`s bateau. This is where the photographs became paintings as well, as the computer photo-shopping tools did their work. As I was now free-styling I now needed to recall background knowledge on how a raft would create a wake and how water would look when stirred by paddles, and I needed the skill to paint them in.

I also needed to continue to keep working creatively as I went along. The night sailing image started simply enough. By darkening and making the image monochrome I achieved the first stage of ‘night’ and by tooling in a phosphorescent wake I had the raft moving across the dark surface which reflected a starry heaven. But the image, while semi-accurate to ‘reality’, lacked any real punch. It needed something more and when I placed the imaginary oil lamp at the masthead and lit the cabin from within, I finally had something. The golden light spilled out of the window, through the cracks, and touched the deck and a mast just enough to give the effect I wanted. How often on night watch have I myself glanced down the companionway hatch to drink in that same warm glow from the reading lamps of the crew below and then raised my eyes again to the windswept, star-filled sky and the faint curve of the horizon we were sailing endlessly towards.

One thing was obvious however, just because these were photographs of a model did not mean that just any old pictures would do. I still needed to make good, interesting images. Where will this project go from here? Well this camera will make HD videos and I have always been interested in action and story telling. Perhaps this model raft project will not end here but be a good beginning for something new and the raft folks will have more adventures.

The Self. Who is that masked man?

2011-02-04T10:06:00.000-08:00

The self is the sun shining in the sky,

The wind blowing in space; he is the fire

At the altar and in the home of the guest;

He dwells in human beings, in gods, in truth,

And in the vast firmament; he is the fish

Born in the water, the plant growing in the earth,

The river flowing down from the mountain.

Katha Upanishads, II.2.2.

For the past month I have been using the many rainy days to work in my studio and one of my projects has been to continue practicing with lighting and the human body. Not having a lovely female model to work with I substituted the next best thing, myself. Oops now wait, I was not bragging here about my elderly male figure but stating a kind of truth all the same. Female nudes are actually fiendishly difficult to do if one is to avoid a kind of voyeurism and yet say something even faintly original with this all-to-familiar subject matter. Oneself, however, presents a different set of problems: who am I, where am I going? The subject is oneself and it is equally difficult to make a photograph that gets below the surface smile, the social face. In a self portrait, the mind that thinks is split between the photographer and the model and, with that disconnect, what emerges can be unsettling. “Who is that masked man?”

Partly, the fact that I am using a 10 second timer on the camera shutter is a help because in the time it takes to press the button and jump into position there is no time to smile at the camera. There is no person at the camera anyway to relate to and one`s mind is busy getting the right angle for this new set of lighting directions. The photos have a preoccupied air, the eyes are focused and the mind attached behind them is busy and not thinking about a nice smile. That kind of piercing look in public makes people shudder and turn away. It does, though, achieve the first important step toward a self image that is deeper than ‘a nice portrait’.

One dark overcast day I move my tripod and camera out under the still darker shadow of some big cedar trees. I will pose against the trunk of one while setting the flash unit to bounce off another trunk nearby. The light will come from the side, 10 second timer is on, I leap into position and turn my head just so and perhaps just because I am bored with the standard pose I cross my hands on my chest. Is that Tolstoyesque person really me? Next I cross the path to a bank of salal undergrowth. This time I use a big white reflector board to bounce the flash and dive into the salal. I have been visualizing a photo like this for a while. Flash! Oops, I was nearly out of the frame and somewhat out of focus. Next time I burrow into the salal right in front of the camera. Perfect! Well focused, well lighted. Only later when I can see these two images on the computer screen do I decide to choose the first. There is my dead self partially covered by the undergrowth, faded and shoved off into a corner. Lost and forgotten! A much more powerful image and one I had not seen coming. Unsettling is good.

Yesterday I lugged my big tripod down the path to Indian Point. I now have a battery for my remote shutter release so I can set the camera up, choose a focus point, and then stroll down to my chosen position on the cliff edge and trigger the shutter by remote control. This is really civilized, but unfortunately the face in the image is my social face again. No pressure, I revert to nice. Next I turn away and stare out to sea and, who knows why, I rest my hand on the long oak branch beside me as the shutter fires. The result is powerful though, and I could be anyone, so now that I am back on track I move to the beach which is wet from recent rain. The green sea swishes gently up the granite pebbles, a brown log lies at an angle and behind it all is my favorite cliff of rock, rain-varnished in exquisite detail. I set the camera and tripod, walk up to the rock-face, carefully step into the water, turn, and lie on the beach facing the log. Click! Here, in these two beach photos the tree has reached out to me to take my hand in unity and Bill on the beach this time is more impersonal, a sea lion perhaps, big and brown, who has come ashore for a snooze, an element among several in the composition.

It takes something dramatic to break through the social mask; fierce focus, a unpremeditated dramatic step beyond the ordinary, a kind of death of my public self. What I have found is the Self behind the self. The one who lives in all things as the Upanishads say, is the tree and the rock , the sea and all its creatures and somewhere above the clouds the sun himself.

Communication in partnership: beauty, the maker and the receiver.

2011-01-28T09:02:00.000-08:00

It’s a tricky thing, this making of images, because while it may seem to the maker that it is an individual process, what has been made must now communicate with viewers if the circle is to be completed. While the artist must work with ‘knowledge, sensitiveness and imagination’ if he wishes his work to be taken seriously, it is important to understand that the viewer must expect to put the same serious thought into it. The meeting is not so much between minds but somewhere out there where new thought is developed, hovering in the air between the work of art and the viewer. It is as if the artist pushes the idea forward into view and the viewer must be alert to receive it and be ready to make a similar leap into new awareness. The following quote from a book I read recently expresses this thought well.

“Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is the melody that he sings for you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination”.

‘The Moon and Sixpence’. By Somerset Maugham

Frosty morning at Burgoyne Bay

2011-01-23T16:56:00.000-08:00

After several clear bright frosty days, the heavy clouds of an approaching warm front coat the sparkling landscape with an even wash of grey. After so many splendid days for photography it is a temptation to leave my camera at home when the family sets off for a morning walk on the other side of the island. But no, I`ve tried that before and nearly always regretted it later.

I do try something different today though, as we set out on the cliff-edge trail that leads through the woods, beside the fields, and down to the beach. I adjust the camera setting that controls the degree of colour that the camera will render as it takes the picture. If the landscape is grey, I reason, then lets juice it up by recording in extra vivid. I`ve done something like this before, adjusting a normal image in the computer post-capture, but never tried this exact thing . Here we go with another camera adventure.

Sure enough, the red rails of the Government wharf glow brightly through the dark silhouettes of trees, and later on, as we step down to the beach at last, the white hull of a beached sailboat shows an otherwise unnoticed blue of winter light behind the bare branches of a maple. That sailboat, on closer inspection is a treasure trove of images, - the frost-covered rigging and mast lean sharply against the dark, cloud-shrouded mountainside. This vivid camera setting is doing some fascinating things in this dull landscape that is different somehow from the results I would get if I applied it later in a photo program.

This far end of the beach is always in the shadow of the steep slope of the mountain. The winter sun just cannot reach into this corner and the frost has had time to grow large crystals in the cold, but damp air of the past week. All around me is a delicate white hoarfrost that would be sparkling if the sun were not shrouded and could reach in here. I follow a creek back towards the woods and find at the upper end of the driftwood swath at the high tide line that the stream`s spray has formed some most interesting crystal patterns. Holding the camera down close to the rushing water I can capture this fairy world without having to crawl on my belly in the cold and wet. There is such value for me always when the camera can get up close and personal with the surface of the earth.

Soon we are walking through the old farm fields, past the barn and back to our vehicle. I`m very glad I brought my camera today, grey overcast, chilly morning, and all.

Duck arrows

Swans

Hoarfrost

The gods. Are they primitive or are we?

2011-01-17T19:38:00.000-08:00

The other day while writing about my carving process I wrote about having dreamed repeatedly, while still a little boy, of The Thunderbird, a North American Indian spirit being, and how that experience lead me to be a carver and ultimately an artist. I imagined readers thinking, “How weird is that?” I was, after all, born in England and have no aboriginal blood. How could I have experienced this intimation without even the cultural background to suggest that this could happen?

I can only think that some children are more suggestible than others and that solitary time spent in the forest and along the seashore opened me to that experience. Perhaps too, although I missed the usual means by which Indian boys traditionally escaped briefly from their cultural ways to experience their guardian spirit; hunger, lack of sleep, solitude, I did something similar, - I had been moved from one country to another, all around me was strange, and in a busy family time I was left to wander. For that important opening into a new reality, I was ready.

What that tells me is that there is a relationship between landscape and people that expresses itself quite naturally in the form of intermediary spirits: that thousands of elements of the natural world combine with our own sensibility and communicate what we need to know in order to exist together in harmony.

This is not a novel or revolutionary concept, just the accumulated experience of humankind since the world began for us. The real novelty is that there should exist people for whom this would sound unusual. Many of us today would find belief in the gods and spirits of hill and stream to be ‘primitive’ and backward. We are beyond superstition. Some of us may still believe in a universal spirit, but many have cheerfully chucked that out as well. God survives as a swear word only, or accidently slips out in times of stress or passion. Fair enough, but from a practical viewpoint what also goes out the window with this ‘enlightened’ world view?

Is it possible that the ‘Gods’ and all the stories associated with them ( remember Zeus, Apollo, Athene, etc.?) represent a complex and sophisticated system of thought, and without access to that tool of relationship it is we that are underdeveloped and our thought systems primitive? We have thrown away a form of thinking that grew along within our physical and cultural development. How to synchronize our human ways with the greater systems we call ‘our’ environment is a current concern with dire consequences if we don`t. Libations to the Gods may not be popular in the modern context but a deep understanding of our place in the partnership is still needed at the most instinctive as well as intellectual level.

Carving 4. Photographing the art work for best effect.

2011-01-11T10:44:00.000-08:00

One might think that taking pictures of my own sculptures would be a snap. But in reality each one presents a different lighting problem.

The long bearded face of #1 relies on the contrasts in texture and colour between the smooth face, carved in the darker heartwood, and the lighter beard with its rippled wood and hairy-textured surface. After several attempts I put my Speedlight flash aside and use the bright light of a gooseneck lamp to sidelight the sculpture which brings out the textures of the beard and the form of the face.

The face of Chaos herself ( # 2 ), swelling upwards from the shallow cedar bowl, calls for a different approach. I try side lighting again and the shadows do pick out the contours of the face nicely but was that really what was being said here? I take the camera, pop up the on-camera flash, reset the exposure down to darken the final image and then turn off the lights in the studio. I wish to take advantage of the contrast between the shiny eyes, the ‘spit’ in the mouth, and the softer rubbed wax finish on the wood grain of the remaining surface. I use the focussing beam of light from the camera to light up the carving and keep repeating the light beam as I move slightly up and down and side to side until I can see that there is a good reflection from the yellow cedar plug and the eyes. Click/Flash, and I have a photograph that enhances the idea of the carving.

The torso ( #3 ) has problems all of its own. I try simple side lighting and frontal flash but neither brings out the gentle form or interesting spalded textures. I decide to treat this as if I were lighting a real torso and begin a series of speedlight flash photos. By bouncing the flash from the sloping ceiling off to one side and using a mirror on the other to redirect that main light so it will highlight the edge of the shadow side I am able to give gently modulated light to the varnished form, bring out the patterned areas nicely and yet not loose the lovely curve of the hip on the shadow side. Reflection of the main light on the smooth varnished surface is a problem but I persevere until I can get just enough to show that it is a shiny surface but not so it glares off the most important areas.

This was an interesting problem I set myself. Lighting, it turned out could make or break the photographic impact of the wood carvings. Being the maker, I had a gut understanding of what they were really all about and was able to light them in such a way that each communicated well in its own way.

Carving 3. The torso. Working with spalded wood.

2011-01-10T19:49:00.000-08:00

This grey, semi-rotten chunk of wood looks to be a doubtful prospect for a carving, but I start to trim away the softened grey surface layers to see what lies within. This was once a crotch of a maple branch, and I discover that in the years of lying in the open it has begun to spald: a complex and beautiful rot pattern sweeps diagonally across the form. Whatever I do with this wood will have to showcase this beautiful pattern, and the two stumps of ‘legs’ of what were once branches gives me the clue. There is no forcing my ideas on the wood, the direction this carving will take is obvious.

How accurate to a real female body do I need to be? The wood has already been chainsawed off at the back so a full three-dimensional form is not possible and anyway my purpose is to make a reference to reality rather than a copy. The wood and its patterning takes priority here. I begin to carve with the circlet cutter but soon switch to the belt sander which will shape the gently rounded form more safely. The wood is still hard in most places but I would hate to gouge it accidently by hitting a soft area with the rapidly whirling blade.

Final sanding takes a long time as usual, but eventually I paint on the first coat of Swedish oil. At last I can see what the finished piece will look like! The sanded wood soaks up the oil and the contrast between the light blond of the solid maple and the dark spalded pattern is spectacular. I follow this up later with two coats of spar varnish to harden the surface, sand again, and then spray on several coats of satin urethane varnish. The oil, and all those layers of varnish bring out the depth and beauty of the wood.

Carving 2. A Creation story. From spit, everything is made.

2011-01-09T16:15:00.000-08:00

On the last carving I learned to control the circlet cutter and know now that I could use it to hollow out freeform bowls if I wished. I don`t right now, but in looking at this two inch thick red cedar plank I begin to understand how I could use that technique for my next image. Another face, I think, because I am simply moving from carving to carving right now, getting into the flow and saving the really big blocks of wood for later when I hope to be really up to speed. My thoughts are still slack and unfocussed.

I begin to hollow out a circular trough as though I was carving a square bowl with the center left for later. I draw a simple face with large eyes in the center, and begin to work on that too, slowly lowering some areas and delineating eyes, nose and eyebrows. This will need to be a broad fairly flat face because there is only a shallow depth to work within. While some sculptors build up their forms piece by piece, I am much happier to cut away and slowly expose the being contained within. This tool slices so quickly that I need to slow down. I can`t imagine as fast as I am capable of cutting. I am soon at the point where I must switch to the belt sander and use its nose to slowly grind out and refine the rest of the form.

To this point I have been thinking my process through in a practical way, but now, as the face becomes more refined, as the eyes, with some help from my knife, become more dominant, I begin to get a glimmer of what is being born. The mouth opens and the bottom lip stretches, leaving a round hollow waiting to be filled. I carve a separate plug of yellow cedar and glue it in. The eyes are blind still, I have yet to carve in the pupils, and I stop myself just in time. I get it! The image is blind as it presses upward through the force lines of the cedar grain. It is spitting out a gob of spit into the nothingness of another dimension and that act will come to be named the Big Bang, the creation of the universe, everything that we experience as reality sharing in the essence of that expectoration.

When all the finishing sanding is complete I apply an oil finish and later a paste wax to bring out the grain of the wood. Everything that is, but the eyes and yellow cedar mouth disc. The eyes I first paint white and when they are dry I apply several coats of Spar varnish to them and the mouth plug and gives a highly reflective finish to both.

I could never have known at the beginning what would eventually come out of this piece of wood and I remain a little puzzled. To imagine such an image, the creation of everything, is the stuff of dreams and this was a waking dream. I remember the stories about serious scientists who have their impossibly difficult to develop theories solved visually for them while they sleep. I also know that every culture on earth has an origin story, Chaos, in the ancient Greek pantheon of the gods, is how the world came to be and that parallels my own realization in wood. This is a small and simple carving that has dreamed big, providing me with an intermediary thought in concrete form which, if I can stretch my mind far enough, will lead me to on to new understandings and creativity.

P.S. So, seriously, what came before the Big Bang? Spit? And if so we should be able to find its ‘DNA’ spread out through the universe. Some wave, matter, or perhaps the tendency for the development of life from some pretty basic elements? Those old stories from all world cultures about how the word began: perhaps they were not so far out after all. Certainly our minds work comfortably with metaphor, forming images that can speak to us of things that are difficult to conceptualize in a purely rational way. Science misses a lot when it does not also train its specialists in the art of intuitive imagination.

Carving.1. The old one.

2010-12-31T17:52:00.000-08:00

This Fall I have begun to carve again. This was my first childhood creative work and I have picked it up again from time to time. It comes more easily to me and is the most intimate experience I have with the side of my personality that communicates through imagery. As a child the only art I saw being produced in my little coastal BC community of Mill Bay was that produced by the Indians down the road by the ferry dock. In the big wooden buildings by the beach were dugout canoes and in the cemetery, totem poles, and that was what I carved too with my pocket knife.

It never occurred to me that I was transgressing on another culture`s tradition. I had a powerful dream of the Thunderbird several times and I never thought to doubt that this could not be for me, this little white boy recently arrived from England with his family. Ignorance was bliss. I still know this in my heart even though I have studied Anthropology and know now that only First Nations peoples have the right to make First Nations art. And I agree. So, this carving thing that I have a direct line to the spirit of the land with? What do I carve? Because, you see, it is the Thunderbird who made me a carver.

I have been saving interesting pieces of wood for years now and have recently bought a circlet saw chain cutter that is mounted on an angle grinder, - a dangerous, high speed tool that permits me to cut into wavy grained or very hard pieces of wood that defeat conventional gouges and knives. I pick up a long tapered piece that was once a buttress on a cedar tree and begin at random, - no plan. I know that the agreement I have is that I hand over my labour and something other calls the shots. The thick end starts to form into eyes... a nose... lips... and the long trailing piece must be the beard. The machine bucks and gouges as I learn to control it. Oops, that was too deep so I guess that changes the design a little, the eyes will be deeper set.... There can be no thought of My deciding here at the beginning, and this process is so rapid that the image swims up very quickly into view.

By the time I learn to shave delicate slices from the wood it is high time that I begin the fine work that will pull all the elements into a co-ordinated whole. The belt sander grinds the final shape to the face and the circlet cutter puts the curls in the long white beard. The blank eyes stare unfocussed until my sharp knife cuts the grooves across them.

Hand sanding always takes a long time, but every imperfection in the wood will show when the oils and then wax finish is applied. The oil darkens the heart wood and that sets off the white surface wood off nicely. Finished!

After the Deluge. The wild wet beast.

2010-12-22T09:44:00.000-08:00

Ok, so our west coast of Canada is also called the Wet Coast, because of our winter rainfall, but these past two days were very wet. At night we woke regularly to the drumming of the rain on our metal roof and the gurgling and dripping of the run off. Days were misty affairs with the clouds wafting through the trees and dropping their loads of sheeting rain. A good time to work in my studio, even though walking back and forth to the house left my jacket permanently damp.

The second night, Heather said she could hear a new sound blending into the raindrops and I suggested it might be the stream plunging over the falls. “Yes and no,” she said. “There is the deeper sound of the falls, that`s true, but this is a higher pitched noise that I have not heard before.” I`m too deaf to here this sound, so I dismiss it and roll into sleep.

Next morning, waking late after another apprehension interrupted sleep, I step to the window and peer out into the rain which is slackening at last, and see a wide streak of white foam lining the path of our usually well trained seasonal stream. It writhes down the valley bottom, leaps over the waterfall with a roar and bounds off down through the trees that line its course. Right after breakfast I am out with my camera into the last few drops of rain and follow the course of the stream from where it comes out of a culvert under the road to where it disappears into our neighbour`s land on its way to join the main valley stream below. Even I can hear the noise Heather noticed last night now that I am beside the stream itself. It is the sound of rushing water as it twists and turns, sporting a rooster tail in the steep spots and bunching up grumpily when it must crowd through a narrow passage under the forest trail.

Big Pond, beside my studio, is sheeting across the lawn as well, unable to fit all its discharge into the stream bed. The stone bridge has both its channels filled and is hosing water out its lower side. The long low falls have a perfect curl of water and the lower pond`s main stone barrier not only shoots out a smooth curve of water in its falls but is spilling water all along its length as well. I pause here to get all this in the camera before follow the stream in its headlong dash down the valley. All those little patches of rock dams in the streambed I had created years ago are now performing as I had visualized, creating a long series of rapids and high speed twists and turns.

At last I reach my bottom fence where the stream has bunched up maple leaves against the wire, creating another torrent of water that leaps through and streaks white on down the hill. I`ve taken over a hundred photos in one hour! This is what winter brings us; snow, gales, and every once in a while the excitement of a wild wet beast writhing through our landscape.

First snowfall. In communion.

2010-12-14T08:31:00.000-08:00

It had been a gentle Fall; rain, wind and plenty of sunny days. No frost. All the more shocking when the temperature plummets overnight and the snow begins to fly. Morning`s first light illuminates the bedroom with a cool white light, so different from the slowly waxing flicker that struggles to push the darkness aside that we are used to at this time of year. Time to jump out of bed and get the woodstove going and warm the kitchen up. It is bright and cold this morning and everything; the balcony, garden, trees and rocky knolls are transformed.

Before I light the fire, make the tea, I take the first photograph of the day out of the window. An early dawn panorama of big white trees. Firs carry their layers of white on fans, a complex arrangement of interlocking planes, while the bare maple trunks, branches and terminal twigs are careful white line drawings. An even grey cloud layer blankets us in silence. Before the snow can begin to degrade from this perfection I will be out and about recording this moment.

Even as I wander through our forest and later on a walk down into the valley I know I am taking Christmas card kinds of images. Partly this is on purpose, I need to select something soon for our season`s greetings mail out and that need is driving my vision today, but really it is all perfection and the novelty draws me to record the obvious. How pretty the snow is with a few bright leaves sticking out. How warm is the fluffed-up red breast of a robin in a landscape of white and cool blue. I am like a tourist snapping away at the tried and true and unable to see any other reality that might co-exist with quaintly costumed locals and dramatic canyons at sunset.

A few days later the novelty has worn off and a cold rain is pelting the snowy ground. A new pattern of white and green covers the ground under the somber tones of the now snowless forest trees. These melt patterns are more interesting to me, there is the possibility now of experiencing a voice in this landscape that speaks of something beyond pretty, beyond eye candy. I dress for the rain, slide into my winter gumboots and tuck my camera inside my jacket to keep it dry. Feeling the cold and soaking rain personally is an important part of the process if I hope to get close to what is happening here, and I need to do that, to cross over into the other, if I am going to understand what is going on and record an authentic image. No more a tourist in a winter wonderland, I am back home again.

To keep my camera dry, I find myself testing first with my eyes, mentally framing and then referring it to my inner editor. I am not staring at the world through a viewfinder with the camera screwed to my face. I am part of the world and not separate from it and this makes an immense difference. When I whip the camera out and quickly make a photo I have already checked it out and know that it is right. Up on the ridge of a moss and snow patterned rock outcrop in the forest the land pulls me in and guides my hand.

This morning there are still patches of white, flashing their morse code of dots and dashes in the shady places and the pond has rain puddled on its icy surface. The trees sigh and sway in the south-easter and the grey clouds slide by close overhead. Yesterday morning was the last hurrah of this first snowfall with its bright sun and the mist rising off the cold ground. I was there too, recording that moment of everlasting transformation.

Foggy . Truth and beauty on the waterfront.

2010-12-08T17:45:00.000-08:00

“Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,” -that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need know.
John Keats, 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.'

Down by the harbour the morning fog is still thick. As I drove to Ganges over the height of land I could see the grey blanket filling the harbour below and now I am walking down to the dock to check my sailboat. Photography in fog is almost too easy, everything is coated in glamour!

Some school girls ask if I will take their picture, so I do, and then look beyond them at the rocky bank, arbutus tree and the ocean sliding smoothly out into the white mist. Out there I can see a channel marker post and its reflection and, faintly, another. These are just the first two of several that mark the dredged channel which curves through the muddy shallows and out to the open harbour and the world beyond.

I give the girls their camera back, take a couple more with their permission on my own camera and then start thinking about the scene behind them. What will this picture be about if I do take a fog photo? Spooky/generic is just not enough today, but to imagine beyond that takes an effort.

I have been reaching for a different way of thinking about composition for some time now. The hallowed rules of composition that come slightly tattered and musty from the long tradition of European painting work less and less for me these days as I seek a more nuanced and dynamic way of recording the world. I raise the camera, place the rocks and tree in the right hand half of the frame and have nothing but foggy blankness and two whispy channel markers in the left hand section. I look carefully, make slight but seemingly important adjustments in the angles and proportions and click, I have the image in the camera. I know this is just right, that it is an excellent image by my developing aesthetic but also know that to others trained in a simplified photographic formula this may well seem rather weak or enclose too much white blankness or seem to be about nothing interesting at all. Just another fog photo.

What I think I have found is an image about a thought rather than a thing. - an idea, an epiphany of sorts. The eye slides off the softened forms of the tree and rocks and follows the channel markers out into the misty world beyond the harbour. This is an image that engages the viewer and leads him out of the frame into ‘wild surmise’, into the world beyond. Into another way of thought.

In a way, I have reached a long way back to those cave paintings of Paleolithic times and to the art of ‘primitive’ societies in our modern world that were made, not to be pretty, but to create a bridge with the eternal and the secrets of life. Beauty in those images was about truth. Truth and beauty, two words portraying the same thing, were to be apprehended by careful observation of deep relationships and the building of understanding, and not by a formulaic repetition of the status quo.

Finding a new path. 3. All paths lead home

2010-11-30T12:07:00.000-08:00

At the head of the bay I stop to photograph the massive arbutus trees that arc over the salal covered bank and rocky shore. The sun`s rays are still with me, angling through the last of Autumn`s leaves and setting them alight. This is like some great cathedral with its high timbered roof, its leafy stained glass windows and the sea lapping at the shore which is the mystery itself ebbing and flowing with the moon.

I walk toward the farm buildings and my road home along the rough path at the foot of the high cliff I stood upon a couple of hours ago. The walk today has seemed like an eternity, a life time at least, moving so slowly through the new landscape of the upper forest, the low-tide waves of sandstone shores and the memory of the spirit from the coastline I have just left.

Finding a new path. 2 - the shore

2010-11-28T17:00:00.000-08:00

From the forest`s shade I keep walking straight ahead down the sun`s path, step across drift logs at the high tide mark and then down across sandstone slopes to the shining sea. Although it is a calm and sunny day the water rolls and crashes almost continually because all the ferry traffic between southern Vancouver Island and the mainland of BC must go around this point trailing their wakes behind them. It is low tide and where I am standing will be well over my head in a few hours, but in the meantime what a great and unusual perspective for my camera and me! I walk up and down big sandstone waves, stepping carefully over slippery seaweedy and wet patches. The heavy rains of last week have started little seeps that drip from the thin grassy soils above and run in braided runnels to the sea. They shine like silver wires.

There are so many interesting images; the old weathered grey logs and stumps that were stranded here over fifty years ago in a mighty storm, the vivid green of seaweeds welded tightly to the crevices in the bank, the trunk of a mighty Garry oak that fell one calm night while I was park ranger here and the wrinkled faces of the waves in the rocks. This is like a miniature Grand Canyon and my eye and camera are helicopters zooming along looking for interesting shots.

I reach the southern point, am forced by the deep sharp edged side canyons to step back up onto ‘dry land’ for a while and then back down to the water`s edge I go. The steep slopes here are clothed in low scrubby oaks that cling to the rock faces, and eventually I run out of sea shore and must climb with their help back up to the familiar trail above. This is familiar all right and very beautiful with its arbutus, firs and oaks. Somewhere, deep in the forest and up those sandstone slopes above me, must be the trail I was following down to the camping area. If I had become lost up there and slowed down I would have followed the sun`s arc and ended up sliding down to here.

This is holy ground for me. I remember guiding a group of Japanese High school children along this way on a nature walk. I had already had to hold them back from rushing at deer with their cameras held out in front of them and now they were talking loudly among themselves oblivious to the world around them. It felt more than a little strange for me, a Canadian, to stop them at a cliff edge and ask for silence. “Listen to the waves, the wind in the trees, the ravens and the seagulls calling. This is the voice of this land. If you can hear it with respect, it will respect you. You and it are not unrelated.” Surely there must be some Zen or Shinto in this, some point that overlaps their own cultural ways so they can understand that this foreign shore is no less sacred and due some honour than their own holy mountains and groves.

Finding a new path .(1).

2010-11-23T17:36:00.000-08:00

I have spent a lot of time this summer and fall dutifully doing what does not come easily to me, - maintaining: rebuilding and cleaning up around our property. It seems that the thirty-five year mark is the point that all things fall apart. Now that all is bright and shiny again and ready for the winter rains it is time to take myself for some exercise, some re-creation, along the shores and trails of our island. Fall is a lovely time of year as nature itself strips down for winter action. Change is in the air!

One day I stroll along the familiar trail at Indian Point, stopping to re-photograph trees and shorelines I have photographed before. A different mind set, different angle of sun and misty air produces all new and interesting images. The next day I drive further to Ruckle Park and walk down across the valley, past the farm buildings and stop before I take the normal right turn down to the bay. Above me looms a rocky cliff half hidden in the trees. In all the years I worked here as a Park Ranger I never climbed up there. The whole central rocky core of my usual coastline circuit is terra incognita to me. Time for a change!

I am walking on my own because Heather is away for a few days looking after grandchildren. No one knows my trip plans, and indeed I didn`t know I was leaving the beaten path until just now. I have no cell phone if I should need help. Do I dare or not? My life experience gives the answer: yes, but with caution! At first I take a faint trail that fades to a wisp of a deer track as it winds up the slope behind the cliffs. Big firs, grassy meadows. As I climb I am thinking that I will simply find the top of the massif and then follow the path back to the road again, Simple, safe.

This is exciting, discovering new landscape, and eventually I emerge onto a large grassy hilltop, the highest edge of which forms the steep cliffs that I have seen all these years from the valley below. I gaze my fill and then cannot resist looking to see if the sketchy trail picks up again on the far side of the meadow. I look carefully over my shoulder to set my return path in my memory, and wander off down the slope toward the morning sun that indicates south-south-east and gives a slowly shifting reference point for direction finding. Way down there I find some yellow survey tape fluttering from some branches and beyond, deeper in the tangle of vegetation, is another. A marked trail or a false lead?

There is a faint and intermittent trail beneath the tape markers that trends toward the sun and so off I go ducking under Garry oaks and fallen trees. What I worry a little about is breaking a leg or twisting an ankle and needing to drag myself out of here. It is not going to happen but it doesn`t hurt to proceed with caution. After half an hour of following the marker tapes through masses of vegetation and mossy rock outcrops I have dropped altitude and can occasionally glimpse the sea ahead. Soon I am stepping out from the dark forest into the grassy and familiar camping fields beside the sea.

My little adventure has worked out fine, but how long is it since I have stepped off the beaten track? Once, while we were living the sailing life, there was no track and life was all discovery. Time, high time, to sniff some of that heady aroma of freedom again.

How sweet the sound. Sailing Safari kati in Ganges Harbour

2010-11-14T19:03:00.000-08:00

Easing down the narrow lane between boats tied two deep on the floats of the local dock takes some concentration this morning, but this is the forth time recently that Safari Kati has been out and all the old boating skills are seeping back into me. It is seven years since we sailed home in our big schooner Shiriri, five since she sold, and this new boat has been in a long refit to bring her back from an equally long period of neglect. She is not completely finished yet, but it is time to go sailing and get our confidence back!

Once out from behind the breakwater and into Ganges Harbour I raise the sails of our little 25` folkboat and hoist the outboard engine out of the water. Heather is aboard for the first time and is struggling a little with the tiller. Somehow it does not work quite the same as the wheel steering she was once so familiar with. The light northerly breeze wafts us slowly out of the harbour and I am glad for such a gentle re-introduction to boating for my wife. After arriving alive after a long difficult voyage home from Australia she has shown no interest in returning to the sea until now and I want this to be a happy experience for her. Going sailing alone is ok, but together is a whole lot nicer!

The wind dies behind an island, picks up a little in the outer reaches of the harbour and then drops again in the wind-shadow of Scott Point. Our outboard engine pushes us against the ebb current in Navy Channel, past Long Harbour and into a long bay on Prevost Island where we anchor and row ashore in the inflatable tender. We explore an old orchard, gather some apples and walk the trails until it is time to head home.

At anchor in Lyle Bay. Prevost Island

Once back in Ganges Harbour the afternoon sea breeze is kicking up whitecaps and Safari Kati heels a little more, fills her sails roundly and for the first time we hear her begin to speak. “Swoosh, aaaah”, she says as she rocks gently and presses the waves apart. Heather and I smile to hear this sweet voice of our new friend who has sat mute and abandoned for so many years.

All Hallowed Eve. The important festival at the beginning of winter

2010-11-12T09:42:00.000-08:00

This autumn festival is the one time of year when we put aside our civilized veneer and step into an ancient European mind set. The night of witches and goblins and visits of the dead. Remarkable in our modern world, and yet obviously necessary or people would not go to such trouble. What was not so long ago simply a children`s dress-up evening is now full of adults in full Halloween garb. Scary, when you think about it, but perhaps as we all become more domesticated in our normal lives we need more extreme expressions of wildness and this old Celtic festival provides for that.

At the end of a dark rainy trail through the woods, lit fitfully by jack-o-lanterns and populated by ghouls and goblins that scream and grab at us as we pass, (with our little grandchildren in tow, this must be worth a few nightmares at least), is a bright bonfire with crowds of costumed lost souls drinking hot chocolate to fortify their ephemeral bodies against the Autumn chill. Leaves blow past with the raindrops, the flames flicker and sparks fly in the smoke.

In this little Vancouver Island community of Errington a lot of folks have worked hard to organize this yearly event and, judging from the many cars and people, many more have arrived to participate in it. This may be a clue to the popularity of this modern Halloween and of the original festivals held at the beginning of winter in Europe long ago. Before the darkness, cold, and snow arrives, before the ice demons stick their frozen fingers into us, our communities come together, gather around a big fire and prance around in the guise of those demons that inhabit hot places. One really good night of heat and light and banshee wails should last us until the midwinter festival when the nights will have already begun to shorten and the sun`s warmth is promised to return.

The gloaming.

2010-11-07T21:11:00.000-08:00

The nights are coming earlier and earlier each day now, the sun sets just around supper time and this will get earlier still as we climb closer to Christmas. Heather is away again looking after grandchildren and I realize that I am not tied to co-ordinate my activities with the usual supper hour. I grab my camera and head for Indian Point and a rendevous with sunset.

As I hike along the familiar coastline the shadows are already long with bright bursts of light angling through the tree tops to flash upon the water. The deep forest floor is dark too, speckled with tiny shafts of intensely bright light. The camera has a much more limited range than the human eye when it comes to contrast and this extreme light and dark is actually difficult to handle. I snap away anyway and keep walking quickly toward the still sunny shore facing the harbour. I have photographed so often along this trail that it is the light, at this moment so warm and generous, that interests me rather than the originality of the scene. It is light which reveals form and it is its subtle variations that open the mind.

The great arbutus’ burn brightly in the last rays of the setting sun as they lean over the reflective ocean surface and contrast with the blue shadows on the mountainous far shore of Fulford Harbour above which the sun is beginning to bounce from ridge to ridge. Time to turn around and follow the trail back through the woods before it is too dark to see. The sun touches the mountain`s rim at last and I click away as the light changes dramatically. The bright glare fades to a tiny pinprick before it vanishes and I catch its reflection, a string of jewels, on each smooth wave from the passing ferry.

I now begin to photograph the gloaming. This is the moment I have been waiting for. The bright paint of warm light has disappeared from Indian Point and a much more nuanced afterglow now delineates the landscape. A man and his dog pass me on the darkening trail above the sea and I am quick enough to pan the camera along with their motion and catch an image on the fly. It will be streaked and blurry except for the dog, which is caught in a whirl of action beside his master.

I stop along the way to record the beautiful light that changes and deepens minute by minute. Way out among the other Gulf Islands the sun is still shining but here in the shadow of the mountain we are sinking deeper into darkness.

The Old Masters. The transcendent moment.

2010-11-04T19:37:00.000-07:00

It is Clara`s birthday, I have been taking photos of the celebration which overlaps with the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. You know the kind required at this time; the new outfit, the opening of presents, the blowing out of the birthday cake candles, the host of family well wishers who share the responsibility for her development. I am happy to comply.

Later, as I do a sweep through the images that I have collected, I find one that seems to speak to a larger question about the arts. Clara is about to blow out her candles but one is smoking badly and Tim, her dad, reaches over and snuffs it out. It will be relit and the ceremony will continue, but the moment of surprise that I have captured, the expression, the body language, while not up to old masters standards, sets me to thinking about all those paintings that grace the walls of museums and are our legacy from the creative people of the past.

What my image has in common with the great ones, the Caravaggios and Rembrandts, is the dramatic moment; the point of change when something unexpected steps into her life. Those great artists have captured that point of revelation in a much more profound way and have expressed it in paint or stone. An amazing leap of understanding for human beings to make. Yesterday there was an overlap of sorts when I listened on the radio to the creation of another saint by the Roman Catholic Church. The man in question, Brother Andre, had spent his life as a simple usher in a large church in eastern Canada and over a lifetime had developed a reputation for miraculously healing the sick and also for giving people the grace to accept what could not be cured. He incorporated the transcendent which, like lightening, passed through him into those that suffered. And the artists who wrought those images that touch us today long after their own lifetimes, what was it that worked in their lives? How was it that, despite often personally difficult and less that stellar personal lives, they were able to achieve such imagery, the tipping point in people`s lives?

As I write this, the first rays of the sun are picking out the tops of the trees in gold, the air is glowing, laden with autumnal mist. Nature itself is revealing a transcendent moment in the transition from night to day. Dawn is a normal morning phenomenon, but this moment is highlighted today and I feel dawn as a special revelation, I grasp its splendor! A Zen moment, you might say. Those artists, those saints, they got that to a much greater degree and the trajectory of their lives changed and took them into a new way of seeing and expressing . They themselves became the light and we are left with the brightness of their passage.

‘What the world needs now....’

2010-10-27T10:50:00.000-07:00

In a discussion the other day with someone very concerned about humanity`s headlong plunge into disaster, -ecologically speaking -, the man opposite me was musing about how to use the psychological mind-bending techniques of the advertising industry ( and of our governments) to correct our course before it is too late. On the face of it, a logical approach to an important problem. Along the lines of fighting fire with fire and all those ‘self evident’ truths, means and solutions.

I found myself struggling to define the error contained in this concept. Confronted with the problem and the urgent need, it was hard not to agree. That is how we have always dealt with things after all. I reached for the analogy of pre-war Germany and the emergence of the Nazi propaganda machine. We think now, rightly, of its leaders as evil beings subverting the thoughts of their people and building a vast, destructive juggernaut on the foundation of a set of nasty ideals. All true, but within the thought structure of the people involved I know most must have been acting for altruistic motives; they believed their own propaganda, were in love with ideals like the purity of the people, the manifest destiny to have more ‘living space’, to take their place as a world power. Perhaps they also dreamed of some kind of world government that could force the folk onto their (ideal) track. Being good pragmatists, once the ideal was formulated, the means to achieve it was flexible. The goal was the thing, not how you got there. The more you fervently believed, the more horrible the means you could use, - war, murder, genocide, the subversion through propaganda and governance of your own people.

Having always thought of myself as a pragmatist ( the usual default North American philosophy) it came as a surprise for me to be saying that the means is important, in fact more important than an end goal. Attractive as finding a psychological tool and altering the way people think about their world may be, it is the tool which is suspect, just as it was in Germany or in many nations today. Good results do not come out of bad action, never did. It is ourselves who are the ‘enemy’, if we think that using the tools of the competition is the way to go. The world may well ‘go to hell in a hand basket’, but let us at least begin to act from day to day as if good can only come from good, - that love is the only way, and that the way is important, not a goal.

Afterward.

Something has been bothering me about my own argument. If, having tried appeasement with Hitler, the liberal democracies had continued a pacifist stance and not rearmed and fought and eventually won, then where would we be today? Where does ‘love is the only way’ meet another really destructive way? When do we say ‘no passera’, and pick up the same weapons as the foe and beat him at it?

There is no doubt that wars, either tribal conflicts or world wars wreck havoc on societies not only during the actual conflict phase but for many, many years after; within succeeding generations of families whose members participated and were brutalized, or within societal attitudes that were carried forward into the future. Although we may not recognize it, much of our problematical attitudes towards the earth, seeing it as a commodity to be ripped up by our muscular technology, has the last century of warfare behind it. But I still think that, given all the difficulties, following a way of harmony is the final cure for conflict, though it may take more generations than we really have time for to accomplish it.

Forget about achieving the goal and live it in our own lives right now.

Walking with granddaddy.

2010-10-27T09:57:00.000-07:00

Let the music begin!

I has rained heavily all night long, - the steady beat of the drum on our metal roof, but this morning the grey clouds are all wrung out, the seasonal stream and waterfall are speaking again after their long summer`s silence and little two year old Clara is in need of some outside activity. Her Granddaddy too, so out we go into the soggy world. She is dressed for the occasion; a shiny, red, hooded coat, rain pants and rubber boots. Off we go down the trail that parallels the stream, passes through the woods and curves back beside the stream again towards the house. For her short legs this must seem a grand adventure in an enormous land of moss covered mountains and towering trees.

As we wander slowly along, my mind wants to muse among thoughts about my latest art project, but Clara`s total absorption in the present moment pulls me back. I am taking her for some much needed exercise in nature and she, by her very nature, is pulling me back into this vital and drippy world. On the last stretch back up the grassy trail though, she is lagging behind. I stop and smile back to her and get a grin in return. She is not lagging because she is tired, or feeling left behind, or somewhat lost. What is it?

I realize that it is very quiet, with no distant aircraft or all the other background noise that we normally accept as silence in the country. Just the gentle murmur of the steam and... ah, the sound of her plastic raingear swishing as she walks. She herself is now off in her own personal world, listening to her own walking musical accompaniment!

“Tears, idle tears*

2010-10-18T20:46:00.000-07:00

It had been a typical Fall morning, the fog slowly thinning to mist, the trees and buildings steaming as the sun burned through to bring a blue sky and a fresh breeze. The car window I was working beside was coated with tiny drops of moisture and it was a simple, mindless thing to stick out my finger and begin to draw a round face. As I drew in the little comma-like eyes the drops formed drips that ran down the window. Quickly I drew, not a happy face but a down-turned mouth to match the tears. Then I ran for my camera and recorded this transient image.

So transient, like the thought that drifted up from my unconscious and united with the developing face on the glass. My usual mind begins to doodle a happy face, and my deeper self, working with the image, expresses tears.

*Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather in the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
from‘Tears, idle Tears’ by Tennyson.

The title for this piece came to me immediately, even though it is by a Victorian poet and not a well known poem of his either. It is such a dramatic way of expressing regrets for what might have been. How often what I create has a feeling from music or poetry that is its twin in another medium. All of us creators are drawing from the same well.

Yes, those ‘days that are no more’ are surely behind me, but I are not dead yet and much remains to venture. Nostalgia, the looking back on one`s life, reminds me of the old West Coast method of navigating on foggy days. On setting out from land to cross a strait, a long line would be trailed behind the canoe. The crew could not see the destination ahead but by constantly lining up the canoe with the trailing cord behind and keeping the angle constant between cord and the dominant wave pattern they could maintain a course. So, while we cannot know our future, we do know our past, and a careful understanding of that is the best way of finding the path ahead. We do need to cast off and keep moving because we get, not what we deserve, but what we risk, what we dare, but neither should we never look back. Tennyson finds the mood in ‘Ulysses’ that is the next stage to the backward glance to the past, a resolve to keep developing, ‘to strive, to find, and not to yield’.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to find, and not to yield.
from‘Ulysses’ by Tennyson.

WOOD WAR II. The beach landings were hotly contested.

2010-10-17T15:23:00.000-07:00

Holocaust memorial. Ash, fire and wire.

2010-10-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

I have been cleaning up around my workshop, now that it has a new metal roof and has been rebuilt inside and out. Thirty years of ‘may be useful’ bits of wood, full of nails and half rotten, have been going up in smoke over several days and now the last of it, a large pile of red hot coals, breathes orange flame in the gathering darkness. I reach for my camera and begin to create a series of images. I have no set purpose at this point, just collecting, with my thinking mind held in neutral.

I try different angles, swirl the camera around, take low and high angle shots and then on a whim roll a coil of old fencing wire against the flames and photograph through that. I move on to some interesting shots of old crockery, semi-immersed in the coals. Then I do a counter-intuitive thing and turn on the flash. All the bright orange light of the glowing coals is extinguished. Grey ash and charcoal, fissured by bright gouts of flame create a very different mood. When I photograph through the fencing wire this time, I have found a powerful image. Not a beautiful image, it reminds me of the Jan Martel book, ‘beatrice and virgil’ that I have just finished reading. His book is a very creative take on the Holocaust that I made the mistake of finishing just before falling asleep, or in that case, not falling asleep. I recognize my ash, fire and wire image to be existing in that same mind space, creating yet another form of Holocaust memorial.

I am still making photos of beautiful things these days, but when this kind of image arrives I am very pleased. It means that I am expanding my range of expression beyond the beautiful and into more difficult subject matter. My mind is touching things way down below somewhere, and translating them into more challenging imagery.

Spirit Dancing

Cast shadows of a maple branch and its myriad of leaves against a red barn door. A few from the still green tree hover above. The red/green colour contrast sets the green leaves and their shadowy relatives, projected and made visible by the last rays of the evening sun, to dancing. If I turn my mind just so, I can see that this is a companion piece to my image of wire, ash and flame.

All those millions of souls who went up in the purifying flames of the concentration camps are still with us, to be glimpsed in a certain cast of light, their spirits dancing joyously with the living.

Can you imagine. On the occasion of John Lennon`s 70th birthday

2010-10-09T19:01:00.000-07:00

Can you imagine squatting down beside a tidal pool, your eyes focusing through the film of reflected sky and becoming absorbed in the beauty and minutia of the seaweedy world of crabs, periwinkles and bull heads. The rocky shoreline, the beat of the surf, fades from your awareness just as has the reflection of the firmament overhead.

Do you hear a loud crash of a wave, feel suddenly the spray of the wave that reaches far up the shore and invades this perfect little world? Look up! There lies the great ocean, glinting in the sunlight and stretching out to the curve of the horizon.

True Love. 'As You Wish!'

2010-10-08T09:46:00.000-07:00

‘As you wish’*
from ‘The Princess Bride’

In the comments after ‘Red Rose’ was published on Dragongate I was asked if I thought that ‘True Love’ was a concept that resonated in the modern world. A big question, and I could only answer from my own perspective, that it is important within my own life, and that the ability to love profoundly is an important part of what makes us human. If many around me have a more jaded and ‘realistic’ view of the world and human relationships, then perhaps they are missing out on something useful.

When Jung was asked if he believed that God existed he replied in a functional way. “ If believing makes sense of your life, gives it meaning, then why wouldn`t you?” Similarly, if allowing a feeling to fill me to the brim, to colour my way of being in the world, and if that allows me to function well from day to day and is a big driver behind my creativity, then why would I put it aside and choose a more limited ‘realistic’ view of human relationships? ‘True Love’ is part of a constellation of attitudes that enrich my life.

Coming for a British family who emigrated to Canada when I was four, right after the Second World War, I would guess that feeling and expressing one`s emotions was not something that was fully developed, suitable for Europeans of the more excitable kinds perhaps, but cool, calm and collected was more our style. Emotion was there below the surface, but given little space to express itself and develop a full range in our everyday lives. My life seems to have been a game of catch up ever since.

Now that I am working with art full time it has become critical that I develop my feelings and give them space to rattle around in my conscious self. Art is expression, and one needs a well developed inner life if what one expresses is to be anything more than simple and banal. I read a lot of poetry these days, listen intently to classical music and observe the world around me with sharp eyes; a catch-up, self taught course in the refinements of artistic expression.

Perhaps age naturally turns one into a ‘soppy old fool’ towards the end. If so, then I will surf on that wave crest too and ride it as far as it can roll. ‘April love’ may well be for the very young, as Pat Boon sang, but ‘True love’ is deeper, stronger and rolls on forever and forever!

* In the ‘Princess Bride,’ whenever Wesley said, “As you wish.” he was really saying, “I love you!” and that, as all will agree who have seen this movie, was ‘TRUE LOVE!’

A Red Red Rose.

2010-10-05T08:06:00.000-07:00

A Red, Red Rose

My love is like a red, red rose,

That`s newly sprung in June:
My love is like the melody
That`s sweetly played in tune.

So fair art thou my bonnie lass,
So deep in love am I;
And I will love thee still my dear,
Till a` the seas gang dry.

Till a` the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi` the sun:
And I will love thee still, my dear,

While the sands o` life shall run.

And fair thee weel, my only love!

And fair thee weel a while!
And I will come again my love,
Tho` it were ten thousand mile!

Robert Burns ( 1759 - 1796 )

I must have glanced at and then passed over this old poem in a college anthology yesterday, because at one in the morning I was awake with the emotion of it running round and around in my mind. I have never been any good at memorizing but I can remember the feeling of a poem very well. Now I am digging potatoes on a sunny Fall morning and multitasking by going over it again. Anything that insistent must be given some conscious thinking time.

Over this morning`s coffee I reread the poem carefully, - pulling it apart into its expressive elements. The two comparisons, a red rose and a melody. The declaration of love until the end of time; `til the rocks melt in the sun, `til all the seas run dry, while the sands of time shall run. The final promise of return, of constancy, though it were ten thousand miles. Very expressive stuff, but also very familiar and, like an old tune, often difficult to get past the by-now hackneyed expressions.

Hackneyed now perhaps, but the reason it is in the anthology is because at the time it was a revolutionary piece of writing and pointed to the future; the French Revolution, the Romantic poets that were to follow and how we understand the world and our place in it today. Here is an educated commoner ( unusual, except in Scotland, at the time) who writes to his love, not by dwelling on the quality and brilliance of his feelings but on eternity in a concrete, factual way. His love is not some court beauty, but the girl down the road. This is the beginning of the age of the common man.

So, why on this bright morning am I giving it a fresh pass through? The important part of this poem does not just dwell in words or ideas but in the reader`s own emotions as was Burns` intention. ‘And fair thee weel, my only love’ is written to a particular person and meant to dwell in her heart forever. It was never designed to have a shelf life of two hundred years, but even given the separation between his time and mine, even given the familiarity of ‘My love is like a red, red rose’, I am very moved.

That is the wonderful thing about the arts, they do not simply appeal to the intellect, but like an arrow, pierce directly to the heart. This poem is the epitome of that process. I stand with my shovel amid the growing pile of potatoes, perhaps in the same pose as farmer Burns himself took while dreaming up this poem for his girl, and feel that sweet emotion as though it comes, fresh minted, from within my own heart.

The Wild (2). Skid row.

2010-10-03T17:33:00.000-07:00

A red brick storefront glows in the morning sunlight. Its street number is 1910 and that could be its building date as well. A tattoo salon now, it must have had a long succession of occupants as this part of town, once the bustling waterfront that equipped the miners for the Klondike Goldrush, skidded by slow degrees to its present and pleasant state. That is what I notice right off, this is ‘ the other side of the tracks,’ but if one does not see it as such, does not pre- judge it to fit the stereotype, then it is simply a place basking in the same sunlight as the rest of Victoria. The camera is teaching me an important lesson, to see without personal filters on.

Just down the street is ‘Opus’ - the art supply store that I am headed for, and it seems appropriate

somehow that creativity and decay should rub shoulders here. The essence of creative thought lies in working with disparate elements, in not prejudging, in having no preset agenda. The kind of process that drives more rationally minded people crazy. But then that organizing cast of thought has written this part of town off long ago and prefers to dwell on the ‘social problems’ and the need for ‘renewal’. This is really just a part of town, like a part of the human body that has an important function but is screened from view and not talked about in polite society, - is often a curse word.

As I walk down the lower part of Johnson street I come across a store dummy on the sidewalk. Headless and sexless, dressed in a bright red shirt it calls out to be photographed. That is always the challenge in art, to find the one element in a vast collection of things that will speak for the whole, and here is one possibility. Red is the dominant colour in my photo, the shirt, the signs, the banners, and at first glance it speaks of happy things. But red is fire and blood also, and this upward shot has a hectic quality that reminds me of Las Vegas, all glitz above and snarls and fangs just below the surface. The thing is, this is not just skid row I am imaging here, but our society of which this is an organic part.

The Wild.(1). Two realities.

2010-10-01T11:59:00.000-07:00

A parking lot in Victoria is backed by the concrete-block side of a building and on the wall is painted a mural of a forest river. Fishing in its swirling water are bears that pause momentarily to look out into the city-scape that backs their reality. All rather mind bending once you really look at what is going on - this sandwiching of two disparate realities.

Today I am involved in using my camera to make a link with reality, looking through the lens, not for beauty and harmony, but for the authentic voice of this place down by the waterfront. It is difficult to break the habit of natural landscape photography, but this wall and all these cars is the perfect starting point.

The question that it presents so clearly is just what I need, - which is the wild? The scene by the river, or the streets, buildings and vehicles? For this day I will see these seedy streets as wild territory and photograph them as such.

Who knows, perhaps someday in the future all the bear`s real natural habitat will be paved over, or then again, perhaps there will be bears fishing for spawning salmon by this shore, backed by a forest growing on mounds of crumbled brick and concrete. Now there`s a cheerful thought!

Gran`daddy

2010-09-30T20:17:00.000-07:00

Little Clara is going through a phase, she is fixated on her two grandfathers. Now, flattering though this is, I know it will be something else next week, - it is a developmental thing after all. But is does remind me that all the people in a child`s life are part of her developing world view and that my contribution had better be a thoughtful one!

As my own children reached maturity I learned to let go and watch them fly on their own. Now as a grandparent I am learning to re-engage in a new role for my children and their children. It is all happening and I am learning by feel, allowing myself be directed by the daily changes. A delicate business, and these moments are more important than my art, my past accomplishments, or my latest design and building project. More important than myself. That repeating lesson down through the years, - that who I am is best defined by who I care for.

A journey into colour as expression.

2010-09-22T21:23:00.000-07:00

I recently made an image of some weedy plants growing against a red painted wooden fence down by the docks in Fulford Harbour. White trumpet blossoms, green vines and red fence. Not much really, except for me it was evidence of my recent interest in colour relationships.

Ever since my artwork last winter doing studies of the painters Cezanne and Gauguin I have been seeing the world through their eyes, their sense of colour and form, and recently I rediscovered a set of colour cards I had bought in art school, - tints and shades of all colours. Being partially colour blind, I had not found much use for them, preferring then to play to my strengths in graphic black and white. Time now to work with the increased colour sense I have been experiencing lately and the emotional impact that is possible when colour is used with intent.

I reread Johannas Itten`s book, ‘The Elements of Colour’, on his studies in colour theory and began to place blossoms against different coloured backgrounds. Orange/red flower backed by a cool blue/green, pink blossom upon a matching pink, green leaf on a yellow ocher. What I noticed was that each photo carried its own emotion in its colour relationships that had little to do with the subject itself.

Now, when I see white sails against blue sky I actually see that they too are blue, reverberating in the intense blueness of the air. Yellow flowers at dusk are shades already, have lost the warm cast of sunset, and are sliding into the blue of the night. And what I cannot report as true colour in a scientific way I am free to create in an intimate personal expression of what I see regardless of what more colour-sighted might think. I am lucky after all not to be constrained by ‘reality’, that agreed upon understanding of what the world is like, and to be free to play with colour relationships as a musician must play with sound.

The light in the window.

2010-09-17T16:19:00.000-07:00

In the window of the used goods store (Value Village) I see a bright painting of poppies. The hopeful reds contrast so strongly with the confining quality of the frame, the glass, the surroundings, that I take its picture. Only later on the computer monitor do I see the little message partially obscured up in the left hand corner. “To bring peace to the earth, strive to make your own life peaceful.” a quote from the Dalai Lama.

I continue to walk down the street, past the man on the sidewalk steadily repeating “ Got any spare change?”and across the road. It is early morning and folks are leaving the homeless shelter and spreading out to acquire what they need to live another day. It is here that I meet Vanessa with her peace sign that I have earlier described in my blog entry, ‘Fair Trade’.

What I am thinking now is the coincidence that, in this rundown part of town, two photos taken one after another should speak of peace, - not a subject uppermost on my mind as a general rule - and neither of which I orchestrated. But then I should not have been surprised, it is always in the hard and gritty places in life, in greatest darkness, that peace finds a way.

The reunion.

2010-09-16T19:06:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I went to a fiftieth high school reunion, reluctantly. That was such a long way back and really I was a nonentity in the high school scene. Now I am in a crowd of sixty-eight year olds, the vast majority of whom I do not know, now or in the past. As I cruise, peering at name tags for familiar names and faces, I stop and hold short conversations with anyone who is sitting alone. The standard conversation with the males involves a short statement of their lives, -their work lives -, and then a polite pause for my own recitation. This is so deadly, a person`s life stripped down to work, -no families or adventures -, just ‘I was a lawyer, construction worker, teacher’ and presumably, ‘Now I`m retired and not even that anymore’.

I have earlier checked out the 1960 yearbook and found what I had written then as my life goals - anthropology, artist, world traveler. It would seem that as I drifted through life I was actually right on track after all. I mention this to the people I speak with and they shake their heads, their lives were nothing like they had predicted, perhaps because not everyone can be movie stars and a millionaire by age thirty! Then, I had simply projected my present interests out into the future and followed the moon track on the water.

A fellow art student asks if I knew that Carolyn Wild had died of cancer last year and I remember the vital and artistic girl that I had known through junior high, high school and university. Dead? And I never said goodbye? There was time on my drive to my daughter`s house later that night to think about my reaction. Never lovers, too much like childhood friends, I had left her one evening in bitterness after she had chosen to jump dates and drive off with someone else. Impolite, but very much in sync with her age, and, in my own youthfulness, I had drawn a line which she would never cross again. That I had then what age and understanding has brought to me now and that I could have picked up that friendship, more cautiously perhaps, and carried it on into the future where it could have continued to enrich both of our lives.

By the end of that evening I had come full circle, these people were not so foreign after all, older and wiser, they were just my fellow companions along the road.

Fair trade.

2010-09-15T11:34:00.000-07:00

“ Hi, I`m Vanessa! What`s your name?” I am wandering with my camera in the seedier waterfront part of Victoria early on a Saturday Morning and have been approached by a young woman. I can see the pitch coming, this is the second time I have been petitioned in five minutes, but admire the technique so I answer, “I`m Bill.” and we both stick out our hands and shake.

“Bill, do you have any spare change?” I dig into my pocket and pull out a handful. “A Dollar seventy-five. Is that of any use to you?” As she reaches out her hand again and receives the money I have an idea that would make this a real equal relationship and say. “Vanessa, You could do something for me. Could I take your photograph in exchange?” And so she poses with her fingers set in a peace sign against a backdrop of sky and decayed buildings with a hint of a crooked smile on her pinched face.

“God bless you!” she says as she wanders off down the street. I wish with all my heart that I had thought to say the same to her. Fair trade.

Moon River

2010-09-12T18:01:00.000-07:00

We are catching the last ferry back to Saltspring Island as foot passengers, it is nine pm and already dusk. Our long summer days we love so much are already closing in and it is only the end of August. I pause to photograph one of the big ferries coming into the dock beside us, silhouetted against the sunset.

Docking ferries has always fascinated me and I suspect many others too. There is something so careful, so powerful and so sensual as the ship enters the dock at last. Those ferry drivers must stagger home each night strangely satiated after a day of this kind of primal activity.

A half hour journey across the calm waters to Fulford Harbour in the noisy passenger compartment and then we are walking up the ramp getting ready for a long hike up the hill to find our parked vehicle. But first I must stop to make another image of a yacht bathed both in the lights of the ferry compound and in the river of moonlight streaming toward us across the water from the San Juan Islands in the distance. A beacon in mid stream flashes once during the long exposure. Just time for this one picture with the camera balanced on a hand rail and then up the hill, round the corner, up the hill some more and along a side road to where our van waits for us shining softly in the moonlight.

Continuing creation.

2010-09-09T19:43:00.000-07:00

In a recent conversation with my friend Michael I found myself saying that all the massive churches that mean so much as concrete symbols of faith are really artifacts of creative thought. The vital union with the Maker was while the architect, builders, sculptors and so on were actually dreaming up, making, the expression that people walk and pray in. Today we experience these things second hand, the translation into human terms, and that requires a bigger leap of belief than that of the original designers who were experiencing the act of creation directly.

This intuition of mine would take in all the centuries of thought as well, all the writing, the lives lived as lights for us to follow, the foundation of example upon which we too must build. And the building is important for each generation to continue or else flames dwindle into ashes and ashes become hollow structures of bygone times. The making of new thought is the vital part even as it necessarily tears apart the old to build the new.

Grey summer skies

2010-09-04T18:34:00.000-07:00

A long hot summer spell has been broken by a couple of days of August rain. With no irrigation routine for a few days in the garden and orchard its time to grab the camera and head for the seashore.

A fine mist, trying to be rain, soaks the grasses and glazes the rocks. The dry mosses have already soaked up and turned bright green again. From the cliff top the sea fades to mist and nearby island`s grey forms merge with the low overcast. A day for photography after day after day of blue skies and strong shadows. Really, I had been finding it difficult to get serious about making pictures in a world that insisted on being so ordinary. Now at last; gradations of tone, shadow-less forms, wet beads of moisture on bleached dry grasses and crisp fallen arbutus leaves. Everything in the dry summer landscape is now vivid under its layer of varnish.

The Tibetan Book of the Deaf.

2010-08-29T21:02:00.000-07:00

When I found that the missing song of the birds was not due to global warming but rather to increasing deafness on my part I knew that hearing aids were in my future.

Bananas: the dangerous fruit?

2010-08-27T16:13:00.000-07:00

This Spring when my one banana tree came out of its winter shelter I took an axe and chopped its root up into separate sprouting parts. It had set fruit last season and over the winter had begun to send up new young sprouts so it was time to begin a whole new banana grove. Now I have a crowd of saplings lining the path to my studio door and they have begun to whisper among themselves.

I have long known to be careful walking near the zucchini patch, they are such dangerous plants, - especially for children -, always waiting for the opportune moment to reach out and drag one under the leaves, kicking and screaming, but this whispering is unsettling too. The least breath of wind and the leaves slide against one another, a sibilant conversation. My cautious mind says, “Be on guard!”

Bananas are tropical plants. Near the equator is there common knowledge about banana dangers that I am missing here? Do people wander into banana groves never to return? Do workers advance in groups, machetes slashing from left to right? Is there danger pay?

These plants are young yet. Imagine being kneecapped! Ha, ha. But this whispering in the breeze is only the first indoctrination. One day whispers will become deeds.

Cornucopia. The abundance.

2010-08-20T09:01:00.000-07:00

Mid August and we have stated harvesting the abundance of vegetables and fruits from our garden. We eat well on salads in the heat of summer, pop warm plums, all dusky purple, directly into our mouths as we pass the orchard and Heather works hard to dry, can and freeze the first of the apple crop, the strawberries and raspberries. She is waist deep in the cornucopia of summer as she pours herself out to bring the harvest home.

How lucky we are to live a life so closely tied to the land and the seasons. In the midst of this it is natural to feel the relationship between the language of the spirit and the reality of our world to the point that all those divisions that religions love to draw between this life and the life of the spirit are artificial. At this level of participation in life there is no separation at all.

Cornucopia, the pouring out, is what life is all about. How many old grandmothers have said at the end, “I`m all use up.” They have poured their lives out in a steady stream for their families and communities and leave well content that this was truly what their lives were meant for.

The Government Wharf.

2010-08-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

All up and down this coast of B.C. boaters are familiar with the red railed wharfs. Built by the federal government down through the years to serve the needs of coastal communities who relied on the sea, they were either torn down or offloaded onto their communities several years ago. One never knows these days what state of repair they will be in when you come alongside to go ashore. The ones on Saltspring are in good repair and the other morning while waiting for the ferry across to Vancouver Island I took a stroll down the “Government Wharf’ at Vesuvius.

Last summer I tied up my rowing/sailing canoe ‘Tillikum’ and staggered ashore here. I was on a one day circumnavigation of Saltspring Island ( some 80 kilometers) and needed to phone home to let Heather know I was running late. I also desperately needed to exercise my legs which were cramping up. Then it was a hot September afternoon and I was feeling close to failing in my self appointed challenge. Today it is the cool early morning light of the beginning of summer and I`m feeling excited by the cast shadows of those red rails on the worn wooden steps.

That first photograph of rail shadows running diagonally down the steps sets the tone for all the others I take in that fifteen minutes as the ferry gets closer and closer to the nearby ferry dock. No broad vistas today, just tightly organized images of dock and water, rails and pilings. There is something poetic in this careful organizing of form and space. Just enough to tell this important thought that lies at the center of morning light on the Government wharf.

The shadow nose.

2010-08-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

There are times when some flash of shape catches my eye and before I know it I have branched off from my main focus to bring that new idea out into the world. This time it was my shadow cast onto a slanting white panel by the morning sunlight streaming through the window of my studio. In itself not much, but as raw material for some graphic black and whites there was a lot of potential. It is awkward to take the photos while at the same time turning my head to show my profile, but a few moments later I have them ‘in the can’ and go back to the flower shots I was involved in before I was distracted.

I am slowly wading deeper into the complexities of my photo computer program these days and when the shadow images come up I begin to alter them. Darken, increase contrast and then begin to manipulate as the mood strikes me. Soon I have some images I like that have come a long way from the original raw photos.

Not so many months ago I scorned this extreme image manipulation but now, well, the sky is the limit. I have made the link back to the graphic printmaking that was my special interest way back in art school.

Fiddle music

2010-08-06T21:26:00.000-07:00

The violin squeaks and scratches as my wife Heather saws back and forth across the strings. It is twenty-five years since she last played and this new violin is calling on all her concentration. Her intent Scottish face with the instrument tucked under its chin is willing a fiddle tune out into the summer air. A jig or a reel, about ‘Black Donald`s pipes’.

Back a hundred and fifty years or so her ancestors walked west for days from the Red River across a sea of rolling grass, to claim land near Pilot Mound in southern Manitoba. Years before that their ancestors had been evicted from homes in the north of Scotland and ended up near Glasgow in ship building. When that ended too with the advent of steel ships these carpenters moved on to Ontario, and soon after that on to the frontier in the prairies. As they travelled, wherever they went, you can be sure that all their folk music travelled on with them in their minds, ears, feet and fingers. Now, a few generations later, it is finding its voice again.

That persistence of music, what`s carried in a tune, is elusive. It is not simply history or culture but something more integral, more elemental than that. Heather`s face, the stance of her body speaks of channels in the mind, of character, that the music is reinforcing. She persists, as her ancestors persisted and it is not at all certain that it is not the music that is expressing itself and that she is but the carrier, coming to fiddle music at last as though fated to give it audible life once more.

The Dance

2010-07-27T20:25:00.000-07:00

The clematis blossoms are more interesting now that they have faded, the centers are becoming more prominent as the petals hang tattered below the crown. I am using a piece of black construction paper as a backdrop to separate individual blossoms from the usual blur of leaves and twigs. I am also using a ridiculously high ISO ( sensitivity) to make these images. Generally a big no-no in photography where the aim is usually crisp and sharp, I have discovered that the grainy effects that come with high sensitivity are really very interesting in this context. Coming to photography from the graphic arts means that I have access to a whole different way of evaluating what I am creating here. Not only am I interested in the texture of the photograph as an element in design, but I see these photos as raw material with which to work. I am making something, not simply recording what I see.

Once into my photo shopping computer program I choose two images and stare at them for a while until I recognize in one the out-flung arms and swirling robes of a whirling dervish. The white and black, the textured surface, are so graphic and simple. I supply the title and the recognition takes place in the viewers mind.

The other swims into my mind as a bird`s beak, and if so then the trailing petals must be the costume of the dancer. I carefully add an eyeball into the dark slit above the beak and let it be. Once again I want to leave it for the viewer to make the leap from faded clematis to ceremonial dancer and his mask.

Some big thought is tugging at my mind as I work. Even as I create, something is urging me to make a leap as well. I am busy helping clematis blossoms express themselves as dancers, but I am being prodded into recognizing another larger thought as well. The expression, the gestures of the faded blossoms, would they mean anything if there was no humans, myself and other viewers, to recognize them, to give them meaning? Does everything hang on our `unique` human consciousness? Or is this cherished belief just another example of our human tendency to measure everything against our own yardstick? That deer wandering across my lawn right now, a monkey in a tropical forest, the dolphin surfing down a wave in mid Pacific, we measure them against our own way of understanding and being within the world.

The blossoms take these attitudes whether I see them or not. The deer, monkey and the dolphin think as they need, and in their own way. The microscopic life of the word too expresses itself and all of which it is a part. The rocky mantle rises and sinks, the atmosphere swirls like smoke, all dances. What we think as uniquely human is simply another expression of the whole.

The Studio Gate. An opening to the creative spirit.

2010-07-16T12:46:00.000-07:00

Over the years I have built a lot of gates here in the ‘Big Woods’. Some have rotted back into the landscape and my five rail gate between us and a neighbour down in the valley is on its last legs, propped up with sticks after a tree smashed it during a winter windstorm. Gates remind me of Robert Frost`s well known poem about fences - “ good fences make good neighbours”- except in this case good gates really do make good neighbours. Gates, after all, can open, allowing passage back and forth.

When I set out to photograph my property gates all went well until I came to the ones of my studio that open into the trellised courtyard and cobbled path that leads to my studio doors. They are handsome gates sure enough, but by now I am growing tired of gates per se. How about the function of gates to open a path into another space. I write a blog called Dragongate after all, about an entry point into a creative way of viewing the world and my studio is the main place that my creative work takes place. Apart from my mind, that is.

First of all I open the gates part way allowing a glimpse of the studio double doors. Better. I open one of the doors allowing a view through the building to a window at the rear. Better still. I set the camera and then pause, - a recognizably creative moment has arrived. I am recalling two images I took several weeks ago and am beginning to imagine them into a new form. One was of a tulip which had two petals trailing down showing the sexual parts inside, - the pistol and stamens, - and the other was of a pioneer church in the Burgoyne Valley where I had opened the picket gate but the church door was locked preventing me from opening it for the photo. Here was my opportunity to combine and complete a visual thought.

My problem was related to my question about the church, - what if I had opened the door and all that was visible inside was blackness? That was likely after all because the camera was exposing for the correct light outside, but was that really the idea I wished to convey in my photo? No, but then neither was it that this was a closed and locked off place. Here in my studio what did I wish to communicate? A bare space? Just snapping away was obviously not enough or I would be done by now. Here was an opportunity to explore my feelings about this space and its place in my life. Here was an opening and it also involved the tulip.

The thing about creative work is that it is so sexy, fecund and ripe with possibilities. Even the act relies on intuition, sensation, the flow of the moment. And then there is the stereotype of the artist and his nude model. For this photo I really needed a female nude, a Venus, just inside the door. Now, flagging down a passing woman on the street has some obvious and possibly far reaching consequences so I put my camera aside and rolled out a strip of newsprint. I don`t really need a model because I have the perfect image in my head already and I can draw - life sized.

It is not long before I have spray painted in the modulations of the form, mounted it on some foam board and cut the outline. Propped up inside the door, silhouetted against the window light and with the overhead lighting on to break the darkness slightly I am now ready to make my photo. Click! A fair bit of work for one photo, but I seem to have made a leap forward in my photography this morning: thinking it through, working out my image.

Later when I see the image on the computer screen I begin to think that clever me was working along unaware of what was really expressing itself through my busy work this morning. In Jungian terms the nude figure is my anima, the repressed female aspect of my personality, and it is that shadowy force that lies at the heart of all my creativity. Something powerful was using the gate as a two way path and making a self portrait today!

Take a hike.

2010-07-09T08:59:00.000-07:00

Wild geese.

My photography club recently had its first gallery show here on Saltspring and the other night Heather and I went to the opening. A hundred photographs covered the walls, shouldering each other aside in a bid to be noticed. I was sad to see that my own precious pieces were lost in the bravura performance of so many large, bright, beautiful, professionally framed photos. Here was an opportunity for me to understand my own way a little better.

Typically for me I had made my own frames, sawing, shaping and sanding the simple strips from the rough cedar planks I had earlier cut from my own trees, buying large sheets of glass and cutting them down to fit, gluing, spray painting and finally choosing mats and cutting them to frame my photos. The whole process took time but what pleasure to have my art work in tangible form rather than simply a computer screen image. I was doing what ‘tiggers do best,’ not letting my lack of cash stop me from achieving a high level of satisfaction.

The choice of which of my images I would display was difficult: how to fit in with the group has always been a problem for me, I`m usually off on my own adventure. No really edgy photos, I decided, and that cut out a lot! My choice came down to simple, non flashy, carefully composed, contemplative nature images. Small wonder then that they were lost in the shuffle. Here was the nub though, did I want to shine out among my fellows or did I wish to represent myself and my present interests? Really there was no choice to make, although it was painful to see my little creations squeezed so badly. I am on a personal journey after all, and my work will increasingly diverge from the usual standard. That is the most difficult thing, to trust my own passion and follow my own path even as it becomes more and more remote from the main road. That pain I`m feeling, that`s just the sign that I`m moving forward.

Nocturne.

2010-07-06T09:09:00.000-07:00

‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o`er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.’
‘Elegy in a Country Church-yard’. by Thomas Gray

Three steps from the computer screen takes me out onto a second story balcony of my home and from there I stand watching the day fade slowly into night. This, along with the first glow of dawn is one of the most expressive moments of the twenty-four hour day. It is also difficult to photograph. A slow shutter speed is obvious, - the technical part - , but how to express in pixels the richness of the moment, the evocative, important part of the creative process?

Left to its own devices the camera will try to brighten up the darkness to a ‘correct exposure’ and that I must avoid, but how to catch the scent of flowers, fir needles and drying grasses. How to express the rich sadness that permeates the air as in the above quote from Thomas Gray? Once the image is in the computer I experiment with several possibilities. Perhaps by darkening the image and increasing the saturation of the colours? Or making it into a moonlit black and white? Or the same with a blue tint added? Lighter? More contrasty? Softer? The possibilities are endless.

While manipulating the image on the computer screen I am drifting into a nocturnal musical mood, feeling the mood within myself, and eventually settle on my first instinctive choice of rich colour and velvety shadows. Nocturne.

AT THE MARKET. Translating our experience through the senses into ‘Reality’.

2010-06-25T08:45:00.000-07:00

The photo is all swirls of colour and partially repeating fragments of form. It has been made with a slow shutter speed with a camera slung at waist level and running on automatic focus. An interesting playing with reality we might say, using a sharply focused, frozen image as our standard of comparison. What if, in actual reality, it is reversed and the swirly image is how we sense the world and the concrete organized picture is what we create out of the fragmented input to our brains?

The total sensory experience during that morning at the market would have included a stream of information from smell, hearing, and touch as well as visual. The visual alone would have been changing rapidly in the shifting crowds of people, close up, moving, distant, all mish-mashed together just like in the photograph.

We all select to a great degree what we see and how we blend our total sensory input into a much simplified mind view. From birth we have been learning our culture`s take on the world and combining it with the inherited physical abilities of how our brains process information. We simply use a system of stereotyping to give us a quickly updated version of the current situation. What is reality is something else again.

Ritual. Planting.

2010-06-22T08:40:00.000-07:00

At the end of last month we were placing the last lot of vegetable seeds in the ground. Rake, rake, poke holes, place the corn and beans seeds in the ground and cover them up. Such a simple Spring ritual that has been a human activity for thousands of years. The future of the garden too is all mapped out; watch for the emerging plants, weed out the competition, keep the soil moist. Eventually we will begin to harvest the crop as the summer cools and the nights grow longer. Harvesting and preserving: canning, freezing, drying, saving seed for next year. Ready for winter with potatoes and other winter vegetables still in the garden to be harvested throughout the cold dark months. An extended ritual that is not generally acknowledged as such, not given its due in the life of the spirit.

The big religions of the world seem to have moved on to higher things, - Compassion, Moral Responsibility, Love of God - , but all those old religions to do with the seasonal round, the Earth and our place within it, are somehow primitive and beneath our notice. Some people still say Grace at meal times, in some form or other recognizing our connectedness to earth, air, fire and water, on ‘wind and rain and sun above’, but if we are not directly involved in the growing process the ritual becomes a little empty. Without that connection our lives are a little empty too.

All parts of life are a continuing ritual connecting us with the earth and we need to feel and honour that if we are to fully live out our days as individuals, societies and as a species.

The hidden stream.

2010-06-11T08:43:00.000-07:00

The stream that flows down the sloping surfaces of our land has now slowed to not much more than a trickle. In winter, during stormy times, it roars so loudly that it matches the wild wind song in the tall trees, but in early June it is a quiet whispering thing that glides through the tall green grasses, wriggles smoothly around large pebbles and mossy logs before slithering under the wire fence and, a last patch of blue, ducks down among the nettles and heads for the valley bottom below. Soon it will draw its tail down behind it and disappear through the long dry summer months.

Building a life # 26 Windy Point.

2010-06-04T08:54:00.000-07:00

From our new campsite at Windy Point we can look back along the reef rimmed shoreline to Arbutus Point and the stranger`s camp that presently occupies our familiar summer home. After the initial disappointment we are very happy up here on the top of the sandstone bluff. Someone before us has made a driftwood table and there is just enough room for our tents. In the afternoons the sea breeze rushes through the rugged fir tree and the dry summer grasses. A little bay lies below us, divided down the middle by the spine of a reef, and beyond lie the rocky Pellow Islets. Only occasionally does a small yacht dare to work its way through the reefs into the bay and anchor for the night. We are (almost) lords of all we survey.

We have found a direct trail that leads to the center of the island where the pump is located amid the grassy fields and near the old ruined farm house. This was once settled by Hawaiian pioneers and later owned by several folks who dreamed of the perfect life in the Gulf Islands. All is now gone back to nature and is a park for all to enjoy. Lucky us. Sometimes Heather and I imagine our own little clearing and its buildings melting back into the bush and, thanks to our experience on Portland Island, we find this thought a comforting one.

We can take long walks along the shoreline trails, visit the two main bays where yachts can anchor easily, or take our flotilla of little craft and row, paddle and sail along the shores, around the island and back home to Windy Point. “There are our tents,” we cry as we rush through the narrow channel by the Pellow Islets on the frothy backs of the waves of the afternoon breeze.

........................

The Last Hurrah.

There is no obvious point when settlers become the settled but this summer adventure with the girls seems as good a place as any to say that the greater adventure we have been involved in as we created a new home in the Big Woods has become simply normal life for us. We are much more self reliant and resourceful people now and this will give us the foundation on which to build more family adventures in the future. When the girls enter their teens I will rebuild the barn into horse stables. Show jumping and dressage will keep them challenged. Later we will all take a winter holiday with Amazon, our catamaran, in the Bahamas and Mexico. When the girls have completed University ( they worked and paid their own way) and Heather has earned another creative writing degree and published a couple of books (The Patti Stories) we will have our Shiriri Adventure in the Pacific. All of this confidence to keep stepping off the beaten path we can trace back to these years in the Big Woods.

The barn underwent yet another transformation when we returned home from our ocean adventures. It is now my art studio/gallery. Just the other day I needed to enter some photographs into a gallery show and it looked like getting my entries printed and framed to a high standard would be just too expensive. Very naturally I pulled out of storage some rough cedar planks that I had milled from my own trees, ran then through my table saw, sanded, glued and painted them. I bought glass cheaply in large sheets and cut it to various sizes. Matting, mounting, putting it all together took care and time, attention to detail, but the results were fine. After all, isn`t that what we have been learning to do all these years?

‘When the blue of the night meets the gold of the day...’

2010-06-01T08:45:00.000-07:00

The early morning sun lights the far shore of Burgoyne Bay and catches the tops of tall trees that clothe the steep hillside above the dock. Down here on the beach it is still deep shadow, - the last wisps of night linger, tinted in cool blue by the overarching sky. I step carefully on the slippery beach gravel and open myself to this transient moment.

The red railed wharf above my head is an obvious starting point, all dark against the mountainside. Red in shadow, and to my eyes barely discernable as red at all, but the rigid pattern of piles and rails are dramatic against the sky. What if I were to tilt the camera and abandon the horizontal line of ocean and make a first step into the cool blue shadows.

A small boat lies at the high tide line and I cannot not take its picture, so beautifully shaped for the sea, but now sitting with its keel ready to cleave the sky. This is someone`s project, to reclaim a beautiful wooden dinghy and probably she belongs to one of several organic-looking anchored boats out in the bay. Those live-aboards; the sailor folk that do not own property, do not rent, may not do regular work, move around a lot and are viewed with disdain and distrust by those tied close by the land, are now bathed in this morning`s warm sunlight that falls freely upon all.

I crack my head hard upon an overhanging maple branch as I crouch low to get close to photograph some crab shells left earlier this morning on a boulder by some otters. I fall forward upon my knees clutching my forehead and see through my pain a soft lustrous glow shining up from beneath a black rock. I shake my head and can see that an oyster shell is catching the blue skylight in its pearly cup and reflecting it off the wet dark surface of the overhanging rock. I make the photo, finding in this accidental and almost hidden moment the perfect expression of these shadowy remains of the night before.

A stroll down Loopy Lane.

2010-05-25T08:52:00.000-07:00

As I clamber along the rocky beach at Indian Point I am remembering my last visit not so long ago. Then I was struck by a sense of kinship with all that existed here: the ocean shoreline, rocky beach and all the trees that cloak the steep hillside. I start again where I had left off and this time look at individual trees and rocks. It is one thing to feel a general sense of kinship but to communicate from one individual to another is a true test.

Individual rocks? This really is a stroll down Loopy Lane. The rocks I am carefully negotiating along the beach are so pervasive, underfoot, that it is a much bigger stretch of relationship than an otter, or the almost human ‘skin’ of an arbutus tree. Rocks do not think, grow, feel anything, are the basic definition of inanimate so why even try to reach that far. Never-the-less, a leap into the unknown is always a fertile act for me so I begin to photograph the rock beneath my feet. This rock on the point is the same type as that at my home, a very hard metamorphic volcanic ash with streaks of white quartz running through it. A long time ago all this was laid down beneath the sea, folded, eroded and still it is here during my brief lifetime to look back at me through the camera`s lens.

With my new mind-set I see three jagged boulders lying side by side and the angle of sunlight picks out some definite human facial features. Here are three old men sitting on a bench before the village post office trading gossip from a half millenium ago. Click. I have done the easy first step, made them human. Just over the next rock ridge is a rounded granite boulder, unrelated to the bedrock it rests upon. A mere blink of geological time, ten thousand years or so, saw this rock carried by a glacier and, when the ice eventually melted, ushering in the next warmer period (that we consider normal), it was left behind as a glacial erratic. I walk casually down to the low tide line, turn, and catch it unawares. I have photographed this particular rock before, as part of a larger scene, but now I make the leap to a rocky candid portrait. Farther down the beach with my eyes now prepared for it I find a grey, quartz streaked, massive piece of the bedrock tipped on edge and balancing over a cleft. Finally, I simply see it for what it is and take its portrait. Every rock I see from now on will show its individual self, the beach and I have made the transition.

Tulipness.

2010-05-21T09:34:00.000-07:00

Outside right now a robin is singing its Spring song over and over again. Hard to miss, and it is a lovely sunny morning too but I have passed over nearly all the information about what is really going on. The cycles of nesting, of eating and being eaten, the forming of clouds out of thin air and their drift on the gentle breeze. The relationships between everything that has no reference to human beliefs or practicalities. I think of the photo I took the other day of two tulips in the garden.

The photo was part of a series I was making using the on-camera flash on a bright sunny morning: setting the camera on the ground so small plants were viewed from below and the flash had the effect of darkening the background. An unusual point of view which is always productive of interesting pictures with the added bonus that it lead me into understanding the world from another perspective too.

Two tulips grew side by side, the taller trailed one petal down toward the shorter. I altered my angle of view so that the trailing petal just lined up with the other flower, - a diagonal and dramatic red line against the blue grey of the sky. The impulse for this pattern was elusive. Was it that I personified the flowers, elder helping younger, two dancers, or was there some other factor at play? Certainly it was the gesture, because I had worked to get the line up just right and ‘dramatic’ was in my mind. Seeing a dynamic thing happening here that was more universal than mere human transference. For that brief moment I was seeing the world from a tulip`s point of view and feeling the essence of tulipness.

Screamer.

2010-05-20T18:56:00.000-07:00

Spring has even the dark and shady places in my forest rising up from the mish-mash of fallen branches and last years ferns. The new sword ferns reach upward, all fresh and perfect, their tips still curled as they unfurl. In their midst is the stump of the fir tree that I felled last fall and have converted into neat stacks of firewood, drying for next winter. Dappled light, waist high ferns, piles of firewood and the stump with its erect and jagged hinge.

This tree, almost two feet across, had died of root rot the previous year. If it had been in an inaccessible place I would have left it to rot, to feed the woodpeckers and fall with a whump some stormy winter`s night, but this was right beside the main trail and I needed firewood. I sighted up the trunk to judge which direction it could best be felled, started my chainsaw and notched a V cut on that side and then proceeded carefully with the backcut, driving in wedges as the cut deepened. Dead trees are always a little unpredictable, the leverage weight of living branches a hundred feet up is gone, the interior may be rotten, and if so the all important final hinge of wood that will control the direction of fall may be compromised. I drove the wedges deeper, levering the tree top farther and farther in the direction of fall and eventually gravity took over and, as I grabbed my saw and ran for cover, the mighty trunk crashed to the ground. Dead brittle branches flew through the air, the upper section shattered, - a mighty crash!

But that first part of the fall, so easily missed during my get away, is always the most expressive; as the thin wooden hinge is torn apart it screams, the tree screams as it begins its crash to earth. Silly eh? Its just a tree! But when I see the stump again months later it is the jagged ‘screamer’ that still speaks to me.

The play of light.

2010-05-13T20:32:00.000-07:00

I have been wandering the beach, trails and fields of the Burgoyne valley for two hours when I arrive at the old abandoned barn and it is still only 10 am. The sunlight streams through the fir branches and plays on the vertical planks of the end wall creating a dappled pattern of light and shadows of branches. It is a photograph not to be missed, not for its perfect beauty alone but because I suddenly have an idea, or perhaps intuition would be a better word. I make the picture and then scurry around to the entrance of the barn, step in and peer at the back of the same wall, the planks I have just pictured from outside. A negative image of dark planks, and through the cracks are bright spots of light shining in a regular pattern. This is my version of the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy pulls aside the screen. That reality in light and shadow patterns on the other side of the screen of planks has been squeezed through small holes and now show as dots of light.

How to express in a photograph the intuition that I am feeling. I need a long exposure, small aperture and a place to brace my camera. I step forward into the projected pattern, rest the lens on the top of a cross plank, press the shutter, and then twist the lens barrel in steps while waggling the camera body. I check to find a complex interwoven dancing web of fine lines on the LCD camera screen. I take several more variations while I am at it, but it is the first take I like the best when I have a better look on the computer screen. Those dots of light, bits of energy, are dancing a wonderfully co-ordinated, orchestrated ballet. A theoretical visualization of the light that has streamed through the plank filter. Or should I say Planck filter after Max Planck the man who along with Einstein opened the door to Quantum mechanics, - the theory of the vagrant small bits of energy that underlie all that we view as reality.

Oh, I know my intellectual understanding of physics is of the “Twinkle, twinkle little star.”, and “What goes up must come down.” variety but what I have intuited today and created a visual image of may not be so far wrong after all. We all can sense the deeper reality that contains everything, whether we experience it directly through our senses, through science, religion, or the arts. Through my camera`s lens I have experienced beauty on the face of the barn and seen it also as an amazingly co-ordinated dance. The play of light.

Open to the sky.

2010-05-11T09:01:00.000-07:00

Along the rocky shores of Ruckle Park I am taking different kinds of photographs today, ones that reflect the cool wind and choppy ocean. A way of seeing the world I learned while on long perilous voyages across the Pacific: the natural world of which I am but a peripheral player to the main action, - the rush of wind and crash of waves on rock over immense spreads of time and space. A lonely business, if it were not for a sense of participating in something transcendental.

The black, rocky shore is exposed right down to the low tide line where the sea surges hopefully at the land, but I am not risking a soaking. Up here at the transitional high tide line is close enough today. So what am I to find in this jumble of rock that is meaningful? A kind of sea grass grows in the cracks, matted and flattened and so I use it as a foreground contrast to the complex interlocking rocky forms.... I make a leap of association and see the grass as a kind of pubic hair in a complex of black limbs. There is a relationship between these raw and impersonal elements. A photo doesn`t get much more personal than this! Or does it?

With my mind now tuned, I step carefully down slope to the low tide line where a giant boulder has been split in half. The rising water swirls within the crack, and I take another photo before my ‘nice’ mind can blank out what I have seen. It is a crack that replicates the most basic parts of female genitalia, yawning wide and open to the sky. What is happening today could simply be normal male preoccupations that get buried in more refined thought some of the time, but I am inclined to think that it is the elemental quality of the day meeting the basic forms of rock that has brought this understanding to the surface of my mind.

I wonder if this was recognized as a sacred site by the First Nations peoples who would not have been shy of recognizing this fertility image of mother nature? Did they see a large figure lying with her legs spread along this rocky shore, - part ocean, part land, open to the sky?

Building a life #25 The killer whale ( Orca)

2010-05-06T20:05:00.000-07:00

Each evening after supper Heather takes two of the girls in turn, fishing just off Arbutus Point. Where the reef juts out into the channel is a big kelp bed and just beyond it the fishermen can lower their cod jigs down to the rocky bottom. “Here fishy fishy,” they sing, as the sun sinks lower over the blue mountains of Saltspring Island. Gwyn and her friend Carolyn are excited to be out in the canoe with Heather, the expert food gatherer. Jig jig, jig, jig. Suddenly, right beside them in the middle of the kelp bed an enormous fin rises out of the water. A magical presence between them and the shore! A gasp of breath and then it rolls smoothly back below the surface. The ripples of its passage brush the canoe.

“Wow girls! Did you see that?” Isn`t that exciting?” says Heather. Lets see if he will come back!

“NO, NO!” say the girls as they quickly wind in their lines. “Time to go ashore. We are certain of that!”

Daffodillia III. Daffodil reflection.

2010-04-30T08:55:00.000-07:00

I am out amid the daffodils that cloth the slope beneath the flowering maple trees. It is early morning, I have a mirror tucked under my arm and my camera around my neck.

Carefully the mirror is propped at an angle beside a clump of yellow blossoms, thus creating what I hope will be some interesting repeating images. The first photos are disappointingly flat, - the sun has not reached down to the ground yet and the shadows of night linger on. Out with flash and try some more. The results are dramatic, bright yellow flowers and darker backgrounds or, if the mirror is slanted more, the trees above and blue sky. It is difficult though to keep the camera and photographer out of the picture. I do my best and then go on to take other images of bracken ferns and later download them onto the computer for a proper examination.

There is an interesting image of a bracken fiddlehead, some passable daffy shots and a slew of images where the camera and its attached human are all too visible. I wander off for a few minutes, come back to begin deleting the disappointments and catch myself just in time. Those rejects are insisting I get out of my rut and take a second look.

A fiddlehead image repeats in the mirror but what is this?, - a hand farther back in the darkness holds a green stem across its palm. It is vague, out of focus and almost out of the frame but it is mysterious. I do not know what is portends, but I know this is a keeper.

A daffodil shot has a large bright fuzzy back of a flower in the foreground and the camera and its flash in the opposite corner. If I cropped the camera out, it would still not be all that useful, but wait!, - this is one of those feral images that, like a de-constructionist novel, walks outside of normal conventions. Create a mirror image of the mirror image so ‘Nikon’ is show normally and not reversed and I have a profoundly disturbing image and the camera and flash are vital to its impact. The big daffodil in the foreground is also the small one close to the camera`s lens in the background, the fingers of the photographer over there are invisibly close to our eyes. One can get sea sick being two places at once. The sky and the framework of upper branches fill a background that our sense of balance says is all wrong.

Images like this can keep me looking forever. What is real after all? This feels like another take of another, or is it this, dimension.

Daffodillia II. The girl in the yellow dress.

2010-04-25T20:17:00.000-07:00

It is Spring at last on Saltspring Island and all around our land the daffodils are in blossom. Such cheerful bright yellow trumpets announcing the return of life after winter`s sleep. They are so deeply symbolic, so I do some research and find that the “fields of asphodel’ that Odysseus walked through as he approached Hades, the land of the dead, were in fact daffodils. Such perfect symbols for bright life, gradual maturation and final withering, with the essence remaining below ground in the bulb until the trumpet call of Spring begins the cycle once more. So much of religious belief is so deeply rooted in the seasonal waves of life, death and renewal. Easter. This human tendency to see the story, the symbol, behind the surface image works in the visual arts as well.

The other day I picked some daffodils and began a series of photographs that involved water in glass containers and some black ink and red paint. I acted as though I was doing a portrait session with my flash unit. Experimenting with an open mind and no preconceived ideas of what would be the outcome.

A daffodil lying in a bowl of water. Add a little red colour and it is instantly a girl in a yellow dress, - something nasty and bloody has happened. A murder mystery book cover. I have made the leap from flower and red paint to seeing it as symbolic of something else. William Blake would call this a two-fold vision. (A thistle is also ‘an old man grey’).

I start again with fresh water, add black ink and begin a rapid series while the ink spreads quickly into the clear. The flowers become stained, the water takes on a smooth oily quality. ‘Black gold’ are the colours and the symbolic message.

Finally I take the stained flower and crush it beneath the glass bowl. The flash filters through the water and picks out the still delicate folds, now flattened. A pressed flower under glass, - and underground.

All these photos are nasty and beautiful at the same time, and they are teaching me to look at every photograph I take to seek the symbolic idea that may lie hidden within. Art has always done this, it is within the tradition from cave art up through religious paintings and to the present day. We look at a photo and our minds run a secondary program seeking the meaning that may lie within the image.

Classic cowboy songs. 'Goat rider in the sky.'

2010-04-24T18:13:00.000-07:00

Daffodillia I* .Feral patterns

2010-04-20T15:34:00.000-07:00

Katie, at two, has few learned inhibitions. She runs to the electric piano and calls for Grand-daddy to join her on the bench. What? - but I do not do music, not even sing along. I do the visual stuff!

Well, what harm, she will not know the difference, so I slide in at the low end of the range and try to match her abandon. She zooms up and down on the high keys, twisting control knobs, while I pound away with both hands on the low notes. Then an interesting thing happens, I find a kind of motif, a repeating rhythm, and provide a structure beneath Katie`s wild melody. We have contact. One moment the piano switches to organ and I linger on my share of the keys and the next the keys are producing something vaguely like a flute: little fingers press buttons and twist controls. This feels suspiciously like when she and I collaborate in the studio, making paintings with acrylic paints, brushes and various scrapers. We are then and now making patterns out of colour and sound and the underlying process is the same.

Today, on the radio there was an interview with an Englishman who conducts workshops in ‘Feral choir music’ and I pricked up my ( feral) ears. People were being lead to use their whole voice range to produce a wider sound pallette, the kind of wild noise that Katie and I had been making. They howled and growled, cawed like crows and gradually produced... music. They had permission to try to make any sound, -to improvise. They were getting their whole voice back! Breaking through traditional barriers.

Two days ago I took a glass carafe and my camera out into the bright sunshine. I was remembering a poem by Wallace Stevens ( ‘Anecdote of the jar’) about how a jar, placed on a hilltop in Tennessee, organized the wild nature around it and I decided to experiment, to play, with a visual equivalent. A dandelion in the grass under the upturned carafe looked different from above than from the side, the distortions were different. I decide to rinse water in the jar to get some drops on the inside, - all those little prisms, I think, but stop dead with the jar still filled with water. I am about to go sideways in a most productive way.

I reach for a daffodil, pick it, pop it into the water, set the carafe on the outdoor table and start photographing, all within a minute, without conscious thought. I shoot from above, the side, and looking up to the flower outlined against the surface. All this bright yellow, reflecting against the sides, bold against the blurred blue sky. There is really something completely different and exciting happening within the water than in the dandelion photos of just moments before. What I am doing here and now is the same impulse when Katie and I were swept up in the piano or out in the studio with the paints. The same as that ‘Feral choir’. Making and finding patterns in unusual places. Improvising.

Later, at the computer, playing with the photographs, I begin to remember a book I had taken out of the library some months ago. A San Francisco photographer had made some beautiful images of ballet dancers deep in a swimming pool. They posed tippy toe, upside down, balanced on the shining surface of the pool, Beautiful, yes, but the ability to imagine making such an image was what must have impressed me at the time. A feral and most productive form of thought.