Sometimes you have to wallow in aloneness, like the taste of winter in the breeze on a fall day just as the leaves begin to color.
Aloneness is standing in an art show full of people who can't see the moment of stillness I was attempting to capture, pure like the ringing of a bell, like ice in sun.
Aloneness is having the same interests but approaching them from completely different ends of the spectrum. From the outside you'd think that would lead to collaboration and discussion, but instead it leads to frustration, an inability to understand why the other is doing something so completely "illogical". And while I appreciate that a relative of mine came four hours to help me with my most recent show, I'm concerned that it simply widened the gap between us.
A great example is the one above/below.
The day after the Affordable Arts Festival, I hit the garden store with my dad, who had come into town to help me schlupp art stuff, where I picked up several pots of foxtail grass. At the time the question was some form of "are you sure?" and "what're you going to do with them?" I bought them anyway. Amidst the chaos of my prepping between shows the pots covered my kitchen counter, leaking water when given a drink, filling the apartment with possibly questionable pollen, and kicking off the most recent edition of Kitty Battles (evidently Cleo thinks they're nibbly).
This past Thursday I got around to photographing them and the top-most image is one of the results. Yay right... Except I shared the image with my sis and her response was that I should go look in the fields around my apartment for more grass because she once found twelve different varieties in a similar field. <sigh>
Waiting for me was the Octoberfest celebration (yes, I'm aware that its September. evidently they were confused...), a re-arrangement of my photos on the shop's art rail (which I wasn't thrilled about), and some sunset-hued dahlias. In the car, on the ride home, they glowed. On the camera screen they burned. And the resulting images were like stars in the night.
