i have lately been working with photo files big enough to challenge the processing power of my brand spanking new iMac. when the computer is busy trying to upscale a 500 megabyte file (yes, you read that right), it shows me a little spinning beach ball to reassure me that it isn’t ignoring me, and it hasn’t given up. so as much as the image above begs to be discussed in terms of bowls of spring greens perhaps, or our green earth held suspended in space, all i can see right now is a spinning electronic beach ball telling me that my call is very important, and will be handled in the order received.

end of june leaves

saint paul, minnesota

i spent the entire day in fruitful collaboration with my intern and studio assistant, alyssa. we worked hard for eight hours in an exhausting but exhilarating way. at one point, she had spent half an hour weaving foliage into a kind of mat, destined to be a still blog photo. it was very cool, and it will certainly make an appearance soon. but when she was done, she swept aside all of the unused elements, and we both agreed that the composition of what had been randomly swept aside was more interesting than the woven vegetative mat we had both envisioned from the start. “All that art school,”  she mourned, “and this is better than what I just made.”  “All that art school,”  I replied, “so that you could recognize that this is better than what you just made.”

cattail and prairie grass weaving

turtle lake, saint paul, minnesota

lately, just for fun, i have been taking my still blog images and dragging them into google image search to see what turns up. i know it sounds like a weird form of amusement, but the first time i did it, the results were so entertainingly unexpected, that i got hooked. today, when i dragged this catalpa leaf into google images i asked my hubby what we might see. ” a topographical map of a watershed” he answered, with a certainty that might have  been actual certainty, but might also have been a bluff. according to google, a spade-shaped leaf on a white background looks more like the ace of spades than a topo map. sorry honey.

northern catalpa leaf

saint paul, minnesota

one lesson i’ve learned about nature after 3 1/2 years of still blog, is that you can grab a handful of it almost anywhere, and it will be, in its way, beautiful. these grasses were snipped almost at random, and i love them not so much because they are beautiful in themselves, but because i chose to pay attention to them. just like my children, who are, without a doubt, the most beautiful children in the world, because they are mine.

bottlebrush native prairie grass

saint paul, minnesota