the hours

Whatever time I fall asleep, five hours later I wake up. This has been my sleep pattern for years interrupted only for the four months when, post-surgery, meds sustained me in dreamland for eight plus hours each night. But when I got down to one pill a day slowly but surely my old rhythm returned so rather than toss and turn beneath the sheets, I am productive in the wee hours. Recently I caught a documentary on Dorthea Lange, photographer. One of the things she did (in her words) was group photographs to make sentences and paragraphs; I have always felt that my photographs make their own statements, sometimes speaking exactly what I feel when I shot them, others speaking to me differently when I download and review them. For example, I shot this flower twice, these are the original shots.

As I contemplated the pics later that afternoon, I was drawn more to the ever so slight difference in the degree of the curve of the stem and the muted colors in the background of the first one shown above. I cropped then began to play with it seeing something forlorn in this flower turned away from the fading warmth of the sun on a very chilly and windy day as if it knew that winter is just around the corner and the hours it has are borrowed.

I continued with edits guided by that mysterious something that possesses me for hours on end when I'm creating art, knowing something else needed to speak from this same image; I'll sit quietly and allow you to create your own story for this one.

Thus far for me a single picture has generated sentences, paragraphs and stories though, after watching that documentary, I am curious to discover if a collection of my work can talk a blue streak of spoken word or whisper a volume for the ages slowly, so....

keep your peepers open!®