A little positivity.

Prince has a few words on the subject...


Don't kiss the beast
We need love & honesty, peace & harmony
Positivity
Love & honesty, peace & harmony
I said, hold on 2 your soul,
U got a long way 2 go
sho' nuff, sho' nuff, sho' nuff


... some of which make sense, some which don't. Sho'nuff. Now that I'm done with that tangent, here's my actual post:


I'm feeling pretty good about things right now. It could be the fact that we are on the cusp of summer and when I look out my door, these are the shades I see:


Green Target
Jasper Johns

1955

Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas

Pretty nice, right? I've got new plants in the ground, 1 1/2 weeks before students arrive, a happy dog, a class or two on the horizon, a new loaf of homemade bread, 14 (14!) rolls of film being developed, and time for possibilities. Not that I know what they are yet, but the prospect is exhilarating. I've been bouncing in and out of town all this spring, and now I'm ready to be here, just here, for awhile. I feel energized, ready to create, spend some time with old friends, meet some new ones, take in everything this place has to offer, and not get bogged down in the things that can make it trying at times. Sho' nuff.

Looking through.

I went to Spain and I don't speak Spanish. While I was there, the spoken word would wash into my ears on a wave, knocking the language section of my brain right off its feet. I love language and all its intricacies and subtle nuances, but I was reduced to the bare bones of sentence structure. A few nouns, their friendly adjectives, and a verb or two if I was lucky, snatched up from a sentence before the next one began. The isolation caused by the language barrier forced my brain to switch its attention to the visual.

I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. -Ansel Adams



Being an observer and photographer can be a wonderful thing, and this area of Spain provided a new vocabulary, but the disconnect from the people made it feel like a not fully fleshed-out scene. The people were characters in sets, but without descriptions or backgrounds, there to be recorded but not fully understood.

I picked up some Spanish and took many pictures while I was there, but it was a true/strange joy to be stuck in the airport surrounded by fellow travelers, all stranded there by an Icelandic volcano. We traded stories with a college Spanish instructor from Virginia who was hoping the volcano would not interfere with a student backpacking trip he was supposed to lead back in Spain in just a few short days, a Québécois ex-pat pop opera singer/nutritionist trying to make his way home to Orlando for a singing engagement, and an audiologist from Mexico City who travels to Paris every year to purchase tools for her practice, among others. It was a good way to end the trip, just letting the words flow, feeding each other's hunger for familiarity.