The landscape always changed, but the magic never did. The tales were told to children wrapped up in sheets, to frighten or to soothe, but those doing the telling didn't have to believe. Perhaps it was just as well that they didn't, for the stories got so much of it wrong. They always do. The legends told of dragons and faeries, of locked towers and imprisoned princesses, and this was true enough.
Art is an adventure. When it ceases to be an adventure, it ceases to be art. Not all of us pursue the inaccessible landscapes of the twelve-tone scale, just as not all of us strive for inaccessible mountain-tops, or glory in storms at sea. But the human incidence is there. Could it be that these two impractical pursuits — of beauty and of adventure’s embrace — are simply two differing profiles of the same uniquely human reality?
We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.
Modern man has successfully razed the imaginative landscapes of primal peoples the whole world over. Kill the gods first, slaughter the sacred animals, rewrite the mythologies, and build roads through the holy places. Do all this and watch the people decline. Without souls, they soon die, leaving dead shells, zombie cultures, shambling aimlessly towards oblivion.
“We've been wasting the river, particularly the sediment, directing it offshore. The Corps of Engineers from the New Orleans District Office dredges more river sediment than any other district in the United States. ... The problem is, we don't put it [sediments] where it's needed. We should pipe it across the landscape, putting it into regions where we can build wetlands.”
“We got our education on the job because we didn't know this business. We had started out growing trees and doing landscaping, so I thought it wouldn't be too hard to do flowers. We didn't find out how hard it was until we were doing it, but we got a lot of help from other nurseries around here.”
“I think there is something very magical about Telluride and Mountainfilm. Both offer a fine balance among the physical, intellectual and spiritual worlds. The first time we visited, we were struck by the power of the landscape and this amazing gathering. We need to take a moment now and then to trade stories about what it really means to be a human being. Mountainfilm provides the platform for such exchanges.”
“[The risk is heightened by climate changes that could bring less snow and more rain to the highest elevations of the Sierra Nevada. As a result, water surging into the Sacramento River and the delta will greatly increase the chances of winter floods.] The state's water policy and all its plans for restoration of the delta are predicated on one flawed assumption -- that the delta is a fixed landscape and will look the same for the indefinite future, ... And it won't.”
She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.
I don't create my images as visual equations to be solved, but rather, i create them as internal landscapes that the viewer can explore. I enjoy sharing the why behind the what, of my creations... but my way, isn't the only way, to experience them. There is no correct way to interpret them. Perception is reality and yours may be different from mine and that's okay.