Concrete Abstract 1
Category: August
Black Plate Mandala
This is a natural “mandala”: crystals which formed overnight from a salt on a wiped black dinner plate. (It’s a similar process to the “Perfectly Imperfect Mandala” earlier, except that the photo of this one had only very slight editing, whereas the other one had a lot of cutting and pasting)
Tangled Garden : Robin
I made The Tangled Garden Series as a reminder of the black and white illustrations in the children’s and botanical books of my childhood, and in some Japanese prints.
Apart from the fact that I love plants and many animals, what especially interests me is their patterns, which are brought out better in black and white such as the Branching Pattern of leaf veins and branching of tree-branches
These are not straight B/W photos, but originally coloured ones, which I have worked on “by hand” so to speak, not just using pre-made filters, to produce the effect which I wanted. Time-consuming!
Sidetracks
When I looked up the word sidetracks on Google, I was surprised to find that almost all of the definitions – at least as far as I went – were very negative! I had not thought of it that way when I made this pic, far from it, although I must admit that sometimes getting sidetracked is not a good thing! For me, however, I think of it more as the times when I have discovered something wonderful which I would have missed if I had kept on going on the route on which I started out .
Then I discovered a site called Wordhippo, which I had not encountered before, and my faith in thesaurus-type sites has been restored! Thank you, hippo, for reminding me of all the pleasures that footpaths, back streets, lanes, pathways, trails, wynds and so on have brought me in my life. And, getting sidetracked, I learnt what ginnels, snickets and twittens are!
In remembrance of places which no longer exist
Have you ever gone back, many years later, to visit a building where you once lived, or simply a place which you loved, perhaps as a child, or in your travels, only to find it has been demolished and you never knew?
Whenever you thought about it, maybe even decades after you left, it never occurred to you that maybe it no longer existed?
And people…. it’s a bit of a shock sometimes to find out, perhaps from an old friend, that someone you lost touch with over the years, maybe someone you went to school with or worked with, has been dead for many years, but if you thought of them, you imagined them going on just as they were in those days.
Such an experience really brings home the knowledge that the pictures we hold onto, in our minds, of people and places (or events) may be very much our own imagination and not fact!
Sunflower, yellow
This was the first one in a series made from photos of sunflowers, one of my favorite flowers, in the community garden, or elsewhere. This one, festooned with spiderwebs, was in the garden of friends.
Each of the series has, behind the sunflower, two circular designs reminiscent of mandalas, some religious, some cultural. The pattern on the top left is very similar to the pattern of sunflower seedheads.
Why-Why
This is a kind of digital “collage” of seven or more pieces, created by rubbing crayon over parts of various objects in my home, objects from my travels or family things. Each piece of paper on which a pattern appears is then saturated with water-colours around the crayon, and the whole thing assembled as a collage, sometimes physically, but in this case, digitally!
Why-why refers to Y-Y, the Ying Yang symbol in the centre! 🙂
Tangled Garden : Pasqueflower seedhead
Wych Tree
Wych Tree from the Tree as Symbol series
In this series, remember, The Tree may represent both the Individual and /or Society. In this case, it may apply to either, and speaks to the acknowledgement of the Truths of Nature alongside, or even replacing old texts.
BUT on the green side, the texts have not completely disappeared! Nor should they. Our society increasingly acknowledges the need to work with nature instead of against it, and for many individuals, old religious or mythological texts are being reinterpreted in light of today’s understanding. However, we need our old texts to know our past, so we are able to progress; we need our history to understand our present and to help us plan for the future.
We need both . . . you may notice the Y- Y dots on either side!