Month: July 2005

A friend stopped by the other day and said she was disappointed I’d virtually given up on political commenting. I told her that I had gone so far as to ban Leslie from mentioning Bush’s name to me. I’ve had enough of politics, particularly when there’s nothing to do about it until the next election, when you’ll probably start hearing more than you want to about my political views.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’m not continuing to send emails to my legislators, donating money to the ACLU and various environmental organizations. It just means I’m not writing about it right now.

She also looked at the little garden in front of our house and questioned whether that could possibly be the garden where “all those beautiful pictures came from.” I assured her, that except for the Park pictures, which I try to distinguish, it was, indeed, the source of all those wonderful photos.

There’s certainly nothing magical about my garden or even about the Pt. Defiance Rose Garden, but paying close attention to either of them does make them “magical,� and the camera is the instrument of that magic, an instrument that plays us as much as we play it until we resonate with what we see.

Who could guess these golden crowns are less than an inch wide and only the miracle of the close-up lens could reveal their true beauty?

It’s hard to go to Doug’s house and ignore the rare chickens that wander the gardens, particularly since Doug can tell you the history of each of the breeds.

So, after taking several pictures of flowers, I found my camera lens pointed at chickens:

After I’d spent nearly a half hour trying to take pictures of chickens who desperately wanted to avoid Gavin, and, most of all, Lael, I finally settled for a chicken statue that seemed more willing to pose for the camera lens:

What really surprised me, though, was that when I got home and started examining the pictures I discovered that ten minutes after I took the picture of the chicken statue I took this picture of a real chicken:

I was amazed at how closely this picture resembled the statue. If a student had turned it in, I probably would have accused him of plagiarism, yet there certainly was no conscious effort on my part to try to take a picture that resembled the statue. In fact, I didn’t really remember taking the picture of the statue until I reviewed the pictures in Photoshop.

Hopefully, it’s merely that the sculptor so successfully captured the “essence� of chicken, that it was inevitable that some of my pictures would have a very similar pose.

But I’m not convinced that subconsciously I wasn’t trying to emulate the statue. Art imitating art. Perceiving reality through others’ perceptions instead of actually seeing it for ourselves.

Does art make us perceive reality more fully or does it merely dictate the way we perceive it?

Yesterday the weather improved and we finally got to visit Doug in Olympia, always a pleasure because of his beautiful garden and art collections.

While getting a drink of water, I was struck by the large collection of glass hummingbirds that adorned the window over the sink.

The surprising thing wasn’t that they were there, but, rather, that I had never noticed them before for there were at least a dozen of them hung on the window, some quite striking.

That, plus another incident that took place yesterday, made me again wonder to what extent our awareness and appreciation of art is influenced by other interests. Of course, it’s also possible that my interest in taking pictures of hummingbirds is a form of art and that my interest in that art made me react to other artists’ interpretation of similar subjects.

I don’t really know the answer to the question but suspect that this interpretation of one my favorite glass hummingbirds contains within it my answer to that question: