done

thank your for bearing with me these last few weeks. i feel as if my images have lacked some freshness and animation. i’ve spent the last two weeks in the middle of a major home rehab and the last two days involved in a photo shoot at my house for better homes and gardens. it has been a wonderful and completely draining experience. we made some magic over the last two days that i hope will be borne out in the final story next fall. it couldn’t have gone any better, but i am dying to return to my real life, and to making art. thank you for being patient with me and for being a part of this journey.

squirting cucumber (Ecballium elaterium)

languedoc, france

litter

so there’s leaf litter and there’s trash litter, and there is the litter you hoist onto your shoulders to carry a soldier off the battlefield, and there is a litter of animals, and there is cat litter. they can’t possibly all be related, can they? well in fact, yes. they all come from the latin word for bed. so you have the stretcher on the battlefield that is a kind of bed. you have the litter of straw in an animal stall that is also a kind of bed. you have a bunch of animals born in that litter and they are called a litter or a “bedful” of newborns. you spread litter material in a box for your cat and it looks a little like a bed. and eventually this idea of spreading things around on the ground morphs into litter in the sense both of leaf litter and trash. here is a litter of rose petals for your enjoyment. and now, it is bedtime. i will retire to my litter.

blah

dried roses

drunken fireworks

looks like these reeds had a few too many and then tried to be fireworks. i’m guessing they thought they were awesome.

we spent the day stringing lights along our dock.

reeds with seed heads

slow and then fast

i have watched my friend style a major photo shoot at our house this week. she and i see so many things the same, but there’s still no way i could do what she does. i am a rapid prototyper. i like to shoot off in a bunch of directions and hope one of them ends up looking promising. my friend works like autumn color in the trees. she works in her head behind the scenes, and there is a gradual internal evolution without much changing on the surface, and then suddently everything is breathtakingly beautiful.

smoke tree leaves in October (Cotinus coggygria)

arden hills, minnesota

mauve

this flower is called mauve in french for obvious reasons. if we were voting to add additional flower names to the list of colors we commonly refer to, i would like to nominate primrose yellow, trillium white, and joe pye weed dusty pink.

mallow

autignac, france