rorschach broccoli

these are finely sliced broccoli stems, although they look to me like amoebae, or possibly viruses, or maybe the embryos of keith haring figures. whatever they are, they began the day as a single stalk of broccoli, and ended the day as inconclusive and exclamatory abstract shapes. i hope they enjoyed the journey. i certainly enjoyed my role as alchemist, turning organic matter into abstraction.

broccoli stems

ladies and gentlemen we have a series

yesterday and today’s images were inspired by an online series that i fell in love with and quite frankly attempted to copy, discovering, as always happens in such cases, that even a supposed copy can’t help but express something native to the current artist that is foreign to the earlier artist, and so it is really impossible to truly copy art. you always put your stamp on whatever you attempt.

canteloupe (C. melo)

collaboration

because of my husband’s tax business, and his writing career, and because life is what it is, he and i haven’t collaborated on a STILL blog image for a while. today we did, and we both remembered why we enjoy it when we get the chance. the fun of it was not the final image. it was the iterative and inventive process of finding a practical way to photograph beet slices of just the right thickness to reveal their rings, and their color. it involved finding the right thickness, the right background, and the right surface on which to arrange them. in the end, the answer involved about 1/32 of an inch, sandwiched between two glass panes, photographed looking up through the beet slices into a white, midday, overcast minnesota sky. you do what you gotta do.

beet slices

the bugs shall inherit the earth

there are those who collect fine art, rare coins, great wines, vinyl records, and porcelain dolls. i, on the other hand…

bug collection. shoreview, mn

fragility

one of these two is a voracious and deadly predator, and the other is a placid-looking, if dashingly striped beach stone. here’s what i like to imagine about these two. that the dead damselfly, whose life was so filled with darting and tense scoping out of elusive prey, is still, and carefree and at peace. and the stone, which may not have moved for years and possibly decades, has its muscles tensed in dynamic resistance against the relentless efforts of gravity to pull it into the center of the earth. the damselfly is quite placid. and the stone is completely stressed out.

striped beach rock with damselfly