dreaming of ebony...

I have been day dreaming about the Ebony large format cameras for a very very long time. Every now and then I get really determined and almost charge one to my credit card (though I think there is a bit of a waitlist for certain models and I am not even sure I have that much credit anyway). Then I talk myself off the ledge because they are so out of my price range (my range, at this moment, is close to $0).

The time is coming that I have to make this investment and if it is not an Ebony it will be some other kind because I need a 4x5 in my life. Everything of value that I have learned about picture making comes from this format. Other tools are equally wonderful as well, but the reason I fell in love with photography was because of the lessons I learned from the 4x5" view camera. For someone like myself who is often moving fast and furiously through life it is a tool like this that literally forces me to slow down and patiently observe. sounds so idealistic, doesn't it?

are there any cameras you can suggest I look at? are there any tools missing from your artistic arsenal that you are thinking about acquiring?

pick a state to rest your head on

I love my new pillow from Bananasaurusrex's etsy shop- check it out here. It will be perfect on my couch (once I actually have one).

She uses vintage hankies mixed with contemporary fabrics to create these fabulous pillows. I am waiting for a few more states...New York & Massachusetts specifically.

Lovin the craft world lately. Very motivated to pull out my sewing machine and go stitchin madd.

Thanks again Bananasaurusrex!

book suggestion: outside lies magic

a modern day explorer. professor at harvard university. writer. philosopher. oh curious one....John R. Stilgoe and his book Outside Lies Magic is worth recommending to you all. artists, writers, historians, doctors, housewives, cynics, peacekeepers, salesman etc. etc.- i suspect that you will all get something out of this insightful investigation into our surroundings- because all of us should be looking more carefully.

You may already be familiar with his other work- one in particular being Landscape & Images, 2005. That is a collection of essays which discuss and observe our constructed landscapes. very good one too.

do you have any book suggestions? would love to hear them!

Thanks to David Hilliard for suggesting this book to his class when he visited Woodstock in 2008.

my literary ramble

Image by Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison, Migration, 2007-2008, Archival print on dibond with acrylics, 40 x 40 inches. They are represented by Jack Shainman Gallery.

My Literary Ramble is a chance for me to post poetry and prose by writers that I admire and/or have recently discovered. Though I have been inspired by many great beat generation iconoclasts, Philip Lamantia is new to my world. I am glad to have unearthed his work and will now dive into his surrealist words with great enthusiasm.

Romantic Movement

to Nancy

The boat tilts on your image on the waves between a fire of foam and the flower of moon rays, these the flags of your dreaming lips. I'm watching Venus on the ogre sky and a continent in cocoons.

Soon all the butterflies of desire shall manifest o prescience of life becoming poetic... and poetry the incense of the dream. A street and a forest interchange their clothing, that tree of telephones, this television of nuts and berries - the air edible music.

King Analogue

Queen Image

Prince Liberty...

... Garden of imperious images, life is a poem someday to be lived: the feast of our hearts on fire, the nerves supplying spice, blood coursing a glow of insects, our eyes the dahlias of torrential ignition.

The whisper of the inter-voice to wrap you in the mantle of marvelous power, with the secret protection of the forest that falls asleep in fire whose ores become transmined only for love - all your steps will lead to the inner sanctum none but you behold, your shadow putting on the body of metaphoric light.

The stone I have tossed into the air of chance shall come to you one great day and exfoliate the original scarab, the carbuncle of delights, the pomegranate inviolate, the sonorous handkerchief of the Comte de Saint-Germaine, all the reinvented perfumes of ancient Egypt, the map of the earth in the Age of Libra when the air shall distribute our foods, the sempiternal spectrum of sundown at Segovia (the stork carrying the golden egg from the Templar's tower) Chief Seattle's lost medicine pouch, our simultaneous presence in all the capitals of Europe while traveling Asia and listening to the million-throated choir of tropical birds, your lost candlewax empire, a madrone forest to live inside of, which we can wrap in a set of "secret bags" and open on our wanderlust, the turbulent cry beneath the oceans, the extinct bird calls in a magic vessel Christian Rosenkreutz dropped on his way out of the Damcar, beads of coral dissolving the last motors, the redolent eyes of the first born seers, the key to the bank of sanity, the ship of honey at the height of storms through which we sail to new islands rising from the sunken continents and the bridge between sleep and waking we will traverse in constant possession of "the great secret" become transparent as a tear drop - with no other work but the genius of present life.