Posts Tagged ‘water’

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Earth, sky and water: the theme is earth


2010
10.03

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Posted in General, Photography | No Comments »

Leah gave us Creative Every Day folks a broad theme for October, because what is not of or connected to the earth?  To start, I’ve added some photos to my web page.  The first three in the Nature Gallery are from Colorado.  It’s funny how I found out about Colorado.  My son-in-law had breathing problems in Bakersfield.  We are only #1 in the country in one of the types of pollution – and he wanted out.  He searched the web for the place with the most clean air days and came up with various cities in Colorado.  So he took Karen and the kids and moved to Paonia, the town without a stop light.

We went to check it out.  I knew generally that Colorado was beautiful but I would bet I’d never have made it there if I didn’t have kids to visit.  There are so many places to see and we always tend to look farther than our own backyards.  Many of us that live in the United States look out of the United States, even though our country has some of the best to offer.  But off we were to Colorado, even ahead of the kids, and now I’ve been three times a year for many years.  Everything is beautiful in that state.  Paonia is on the Western Slope, and the skies are always – ALWAYS – amazing.  The first new photos in the gallery are Colorado skies, and then a quick dusting of snow and frost across the street from Karen’s house.

Last year I did a post – Anatomy of a Small Town Football Game – and if you go back to it and scroll down to the very last photo, you’ll see what I’m talking about.  This is a picture of Hotchkiss High, where the game took place – can you find it?  That’s the view around the high school.  Hard to even conceive of for us Californians.

The other new photos in the Nature Gallery are West Palm Beach in Florida, the sky right here in Kern County, Isabella Lake right here in Kern County, and Pismo Beach.  I’ll put one in here as a teaser.  The ocean in Florida – the colors, the clouds – speechless.

Earth, sky, and water.  The theme is earth.

Take a look at the gallery for yourself.  It’s a good feeling to get stuff going again – even if it is blog posts and new photos on the web.  There should be some amazing photos coming by the end of the month – with any luck – because we will soon be in Maui for a couple of weeks.  So stay tuned.

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#CED2010 Check-in: Bodies of Water, Graceful Bodies, and Pants on the Ground


2010
01.17

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Posted in Art, Photography | 1 Comment »

Thanks for reading Putting Your Body on the Line

Before I begin today’s post, I want to say thank you to everyone who read and forwarded my last post - Putting Your Body – and Life – on the Line.  Over 300 people have clicked on the link to the video in just a few days – I don’t know if they’ve watched the entire 10 minutes, but they’ve at least looked.  And maybe a few donations will have trickled in to the Fannie Lou Hamer Statue Fund. I know it’s a tough time to ask for money, especially when we’ve all just donated to Haitian relief.  I sent a donation to Doctors without Borders, an organization that is already established in Haiti and certainly critically needed right now.  But I think we can all squeeze out just a little bit more, especially with the stark reminder Haiti has given us of just how lucky we are.  Tomorrow morning Ali and Allie, the two seventh-graders who made the video (they are now in tenth grade) will be showing it at the Martin Luther King Community Breakfast and later at the youth luncheon.  I’m really proud of them.  Especially in this photo, which was on the last post:

Mississippi Civil Rights Veterans with Ali and Allie

They are centered in this photo taken in Mississippi at the Mississippi Civil Rights Veterans Conference.

Pants on the Ground

One more item before today’s post.  Did everyone watch Pants on the Ground?   The American Idol audition of 62-year-old “General” Larry Platt who wrote this little ditty because he was tired of seeing kids with their pants hanging around their knees?  It turns out he’s a civil rights veteran who marched with Martin Luther King and others!  I love this guy.  We’re all going to be singing Pants on the Ground, and there are some terrific remixes out there already.

Graceful Bodies, Bodies of Water

We finally made it to today’s post!  Still working with the Creative Every Day theme of Body, I extended the theme a bit to bodies of water.  Leah said we could interpret it broadly!  I’m fascinated with water – the patterns in water, colors, and I’ve been wanting to do a collage using water.  One thing led to another, and I came up with this.

I painted the background on canvas using acrylic paints.  The rectangles and squares are from photos taken in Mazatlan, Pismo Beach, Cambria (both in California) and a fountain at Disneyland.  Most of the paper is glossy but some, such as the long strip on the bottom, is Epson Velvet Fine Art Paper (I do all my printing myself).  I got all that arranged to my satisfaction – after several days of looking, walking away, changing something, etc. But I needed a focus and grabbed that Japanese Print book we were discarding.  I have a feeling that a whole series of collages is going to come out of this book.  So I found the perfect images in color and shape, and they lent such grace to the collage.  So we have Graceful Bodies, Bodies of Water.

I am particularly fond of this because it reminds me of some of the quilts my mother has made.  Hers from cloth, mine from water (figuratively).  It’s very poignant to think of my 86-year-old mom and her quilts as she still goes out to the studio and moves around blocks of cloth, but her memory isn’t there anymore and she can’t sew or quilt.  None of us are sure, but I don’t think she realizes that she doesn’t actually quilt as she’s moving around cloth and planning what to do next.  So in the best scenario, she’s still getting pleasure from it.  For the rest of us, it’s quite poignant.