echinoderms

one of the side effects of living in the mediterranean as a north american is the recurring question: “who first decided that looked good to eat?” there are the thick shelled oysters for one thing. there is the horrific looking monkfish. there are sole and turbot with two disturbing looking eyes on the same side of their heads. there are the tentacled octopus, squid, and cuttlefish. there is something called a violet, which looks like a warty kind of potato and yields a mustard colored iodine flavored mollusk inside. and finally, there is the sea urchin, which looks like a pincushion and can leave spines inside a swimmer’s foot that migrate into deep tissue or lodge against bones or nerves. yet still, one day, several hundred thousand years ago, some swimmer looked down at the bottom of a shallow bay and saw a slowly moving spined black orb, and thought, “hmmm. i wonder.”

sea urchin shells

a circular phase

i’ve been doing a lot of circles lately. it may be a phase but right now, they are my favorite. after years of playing with different compositions–random spills, grids, lines, boxes, frames, etc–i find myself responding most to circles just now. maybe it’s purely aesthetic. maybe it’s a sense of solidarity with our round, suffering planet.

the beach at Sète, France

xanax

i just want to hold these wisteria seed pods in my pocket and rub their velour contours secretly all day and have them reassure me that there’s nothing to worry about. there. i feel better.

wisteria seed pods

long prickly shadows

i shot this photo after a long walk, at the tail end of the day, when the sun was nearly below the horizon. the long winter shadows were softened by the twilight, which still did not quite manage to soften the hooked needles of the cocklebur spines.

cockleburs (xanthium)

one twig eight ways

my natural sculpture project continues, with varying intensity depending on the day and my mood and the amount of dishes to be done. i am learning to understand the point at which twigs of different trees will bend without breaking, and eucalyptus has become one of my favorites to work with. i even noticed that its leaves resemble our willow leaves at home, a tree with similarly flexible branches and twigs. today’s experiment was to attach three branch tips back to their base, while still maintaining a pleasing, three dimensional shape. i’m happy enough with today’s work, and am increasingly excited about the wall where these are all hanging, and which is starting to accrete that exciting depth that i sometimes see in still blog, when no single image is necessarily a masterpiece, but the accumulated work has a heft and a meaning that exceeds its individual elements. stay tuned i guess. let’s see where this goes.

curved eucalyptus branches