family

these three stalks are obviously in the same linnaean family of grasses. but i like how this arrangement turns them into a little nuclear family as well. papa bear, mama bear, and baby bear, standing shoulder to shoulder, multiple wavy arms embracing each other and sort of oscillating in excitement at the same time. maybe they have just seen sister bear, walking out of the airplane jetway, home at last from california, ready to spend the holidays as a family of four again.

ornamental tall grasses

line drawing

i was just playing around this afternoon, photographing grass leaves from various angles. i probably took 250 photos, and announced to the rest of my family about halfway through that i was overwhelmed with beauty. every angle revealed some new shape, some new abstract pattern, some new arrangement of circles and curves. but it wasn’t until i had started sorting through my 250 photos that i saw this. immediately i could see the head, the chest, the curve of back into loins, the arm reaching out to hold the torso vertical. it was like a line drawing with the perfect mix of figurative representation, and random elements. a woman sitting on the subway. a girl sitting on a swing. a person looking pensively off into the distance. i sort of wish i could have made this drawing intentionally. but i also sort of love that i happened upon it randomly, and fell in love.

tall grass leaves in winter

pewter and bronze

for whatever reason these twigs and birch bark cutouts ended up looking like pewter and bronze, despite the fact that there is no metal present anywhere in this photo. did you know that pewter and bronze are actually the same mix of metals? bronze is just copper alloyed with a little bit of tin, whereas pewter is tin alloyed with just a little bit of copper. apparently winter light can also alloy a pile of tin twigs with just a little bit of copper, and can alloy a random scattering of copper birch bark coins with just a little bit of tin. but then, i have always known that winter light had the power of alchemy in it.

dried reeds stems and paper birch bark circles

the right angle

i tore this branch from a healthy sumac, thinking that from a certain angle it looked just like the antlers of a young healthy mule deer. i tried to photograph my beautiful wall mount, and then, suddenly, i was looking at it from this perspective, and it wasn’t mule deer antlers anymore, it was a raptor talon, and it was so much more interesting. happy saturday. may you hear many mice, burrowing under the snow.

staghorn sumac branches in winter

beauty in an unlikely place

i tore off this sumac branch in order to photograph the other end, where four bare branches flared like mule deer antlers, and also had little hooking buds that made them look like bird claws, and instead, look what i found, in the unlikeliest place. it was like taking a bunch of photos of my puggle’s sad-ugly-expressive-cute face, and then accidentally snapping one photo of his butt, with his tail up over his back, and deciding that that’s where the real beauty lay.

sumac branch