on seeing

if you can sign your name, say art teachers, you have the physical skills you need to draw. however, drawing isn’t just about the ability to make marks on paper. what you learn when you learn to draw is that drawing is an exercise in seeing. if you can stop the brain from building images of what it thinks it sees, and instead draw the shapes and shadows that the eye actually sees, then you are at the beginning of being able to draw. shutting off the thinking part of the brain is harder than it sounds. i’ve come to see STILL as a similar exercise in seeing. this palm fan is a good example. i was on my way into the local hardware store to buy lightbulbs this morning, and the planter by the front door was full of last summer’s plantings, slowly being exposed by the erosion of melting snow. if not for STILL, i would either have ignored the planter completely, or seen an undifferentiated, soggy mess waiting to be composted. instead, my STILL brain picked out an appealingly webby pattern in these soggy palm fronds, as they sat waiting to be pulled, tossed, and forgotten.

dried fan palm

micro

this photo is quite magnified. these prairie stems, each about 24 inches tall, caught my eye because the tiny flowers looked like delicate beadwork when backlit on my walk today. it wasn’t until i photographed them and pulled the image onto my imac that i saw that each of those beads was an intricately detailed tiny little flower with interesting striped coloration. each flower is about the size of a sesame seed.  so those flowers are barely visible to the eye, and certainly not visible to my 55 year old eyes. what fun to pull it up on my 28 inch screen and see a whole floral world in a grain of sand.

unidentified prairie stems in winter

ps. i would love to know what plant this is. anyone?

oculus

i have an overwhelming urge to reach into this photo and turn the circular-center like a lens and bring whatever is out there into focus. also, the aperture might be a little wide. can we crank down on the f stop please? thank you.

austrian pine (and possibly red pine) pine needles in winter

it won’t be a straight path

i’m in the process of asking myself what comes next for STILL. i spent half an hour in a doctor’s waiting room today creating a mind map of possibilities. there are books, and art galleries, and southern french retreats, and small creative studios, and fabric prints in my mind map, and there might be some of those things in actual real life some day. but the path there . . . well, it’s not going to be straight.

grape vine tendril

botanically nonconforming

cup plant is one of my favorite native wildflowers. everything about it is a little odd (except its yellow flower that looks just like every other yellow sunflower in the Asteraceae family). i especially love it for its strongly quadrilateral square stem and the winged petioles that fuse around the stem, forming a cup. oh, and the triplet branching–always in threes. see, all just a little odd. wonderfully odd.  today, in the alley behind my favorite art supply store in saint paul, i may or may not have squealed with delight at the sight of a cup plant.  p.s. this plant would definitely go in my winter STILL garden.

cup plant detail (Silphium perfoliatum)