Happy Thanksgiving

happy thanksgiving my american friends. i am grateful for each and every one of you who visit me here on STILL blog. i do what i do because of you.

wild turkey feathers

moody morning mist

my deck is painted black. so i was able to take this photo without disturbing the leaves and upsetting their delicate droplets of morning mist. i love the moodiness of these black photos. the mental thought process is so different than photographing graphic organic shapes isolated on a white background. it is good to do a little of both. like doing a few squats and push ups every day.

white oak leaves in autumn

remember me?

today i tried to resume my relationship with black. we had a turbulent year together in 2017, and i ended up leaving him this year to shack up with my first love, White. today i spent the whole day trying to reconcile, but Black was having none of it. he just gave me an earful about all the ways i don’t understand him and never will. my artistic love life is a shambles.

rudbeckia (black eyed susans)

in the beginning

looking at this egg makes me think about the creative process, or more precisely the act of creation. how chaos and color and form are so often born out of pure whiteness.

chicken egg

the curtain draws down

there’s no reason that the end of the year should cause any particular soul searching. if you’re not searching your soul all year long, a bit of cramming isn’t really going to do you much good between the night of 12/31 and the morning of 1/1. but i happen to have chosen a sort of fiscal year for STILL blog that more or less corresponds to the calendar year, and so i am faced each january with a decision about how the last year went, and how the new year should go. i feel that i probably didn’t do justice to my black backgrounds last year, although i was getting the hang of it by the end. i got behind on posting my collages, which did not in the end amount to my original goal of a collage a week. i spent a lot of uncompensated time serving as editor, first reader, and illustrator for my husband’s writing, and i did a lot of dishes and driving to soccer. on the other hand, i acted as a competent general contractor, project manager, and co-art-director on a major national photo shoot for better homes and gardens in our house, which was enhanced by a substantial rehab, the first in our 12 years of occupancy. i gave a well-received talk at the sea change conference in spring, and a creative mornings talk in the fall.  i watched a daughter find her feet at an elite university, and a son more or less gracefully navigate another year of the morass that is 21st century male adolescence. i saw interest increase for my images. i found a collaborator who could match my intensity and work ethic in liz gardner of bodega ltd. and, i’ll be damned if i didn’t create one new image every single day, without missing a single one, for another entire year, which now makes six years in a row, or 2,191 straight images. it’s hard for me to see the big picture sometimes, when my obligations are daily. but six years of still blog is something i will take to my grave. if you are what you do every day, then i am still blog, as much as i am anything else. thank you for being here with me.

dried lily blossom