I had the great honor to be apart of photographing 

two very dear friends of mine this last Friday evening.

Leslie and Todd have always been two people that 

I have loved deeply and have admired greatly.

Their loving personalities have reached out to all

who have come in contact with them and have given

me more smiles and laughs than I can count!  They

are engaged to be married this August and asked my 

friend Scott and I to photograph their engagement as

well as their wedding.  It saddened me greatly to 

leave the wedding photography to my good friend

Scott but I was lucky enough to be able to be apart of

their engagement photos.

Here is the art work I was able to do, just a try, just

a catch of the fire that surrounds their love for each

other.  I have to say that their commitment, one for the other,                                                     

goes beyond words and I believe it goes beyond

time, it has made my life better, and I believe it has 

and will continue to make this world we live in shine

deeper with the glory of God.

Thank you Todd and Leslie, thank you for being my 

friends, thank you for the love you share and 

thank you for being who you are.

The Cheshire Cat

"For some reason it has not yet trickled down to the man on the street that some physicists now are a bunch of wild-eyed, raving mystics.  For they have perfected their instruments and methods just enough to whisk away the crucial veil, and what stands revealed is the Cheshire cat's grin."

                   -Annie Dillard

--Here is to Ben......

"The Greatest Seduction"

"it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love."   -Gabriel Garcia Marquez  (Love in the time of Cholera)

  My cell phone doesn't work here; not that I answer it very often any way.  I can hear the river rolling outside and see the wet stone walkway flowing under the glowing branches of the birch as it leads to the front door.  I can feel the presents of Stryker Peak towering over my right shoulder and unseen through house and trees.  I love this place, I love it because I feel lonely here, I feel like it should to be shared with some one; that it needs to be shared.  I like this feeling because it is such a contrast from other parts of my life. (I too find my self filling my life with mediocre love and loving.  A safe love, a distant love, a survival love.)  I also feel like reading my Bible, now that I am here, and praying to a whispering God.

Feel it!  Do you?  The muse is here, it is buried deep under the compost of the dark forest, close to the winds of the peaks.  I feel it in wet morning light and breezes of all the past lover's touches.  I don't know what it means to be an artist, I am simply me.  If envisioned from the outside I see my self as silly.  Yet I feel it in some places and others it is memory that keeps me working, memory of all that which came before, with what ever this is that feeds the monster.  What is it that inspires you?  What is it; that cause and effect that swings your Newton's Cradle?  That blows holes in the top of your head and off you stumble as your own personal disco ball!  What do you think an artist feels like before he or she does something beautiful?  I try to fill my heart with all that is given, when it is give, and to take it with me as I go.  It isn't every where, you got to take coals and keep them bright and stoke the fire when needs be.  Art is never a wast of time, there is to much ugliness in this world of man, those of us who "can" have a responsibility to bring as much  light and beauty into the world as possible.  So stoke the fire, I say!  Stoke it for the bombs that are falling and the blood that is running, for the poisons leaching into the rivers, for the mother that cries, for the addict with wasted vanes and the little children abused.  It isn't enough to talk.

Art and Friendship

This is the past, frozen in imagery like the subject of many of the images.  Today was summertime with it's puffy clouds and hot sunshine marked off by the lines of cool shade. There are still pieces of springtime left though the melting of these pictures is past, at least in the low country.  It has been a slow summer in coming, just as a slow winter in leaving.  A night ago I a woke with a thin layer of ice on the puddles outside the door.

  These images were taken on two different outings with two artist friends of mine who are constant at keeping me in social contact when I am locked away with ideas and creation.  It was only six weeks ago; an age ago now that the sun has warmed the land to green.  I love their company, their creativity and forceful wit as I love these new warmer days.  

"I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly."

                                                                                                                                                                                     Anne Dillard

Some one has pushed auto-pilot, with out asking me, and this is my machine damn-it!  I know the brain is a muscle and not a jelly suspended in plaster holding two video cameras recording the world and erasing at random.  I know this........  Well, summer is here and with it's long days spent out side, in the sun, with the makings of money and the coming after-math of exhaustion.  I have dirt sinking into the pores of my hands.  I am a gardener this summer, as I have been for the past two summers, and like the past two summers I have found I live in polar opposites from one part of the year to the next.  Winter is at a sharp right angle to summer living; I don't know if this is mentally healthy.  I am guessing that it isn't, for any time you feel like you are on an upper level of the old Nintendo video game Tetras it is time to re-orientate and remember gravity!  It is summer time!!!  It is for a celebration of this crazy place - all the balloons are coming out bursting and then being reborn to just burst once again!  To sleep doesn't seem needed, there is just to much to do and every one is smiling.  I can't rip my self from my brother porch in the evenings, the flowers are still running colors in my mind, as we sip cold beer and watch the mountains play a slide show of shadows.  An artist must be still for a time, must be the sponge before the spout, everything the artist experiences becomes the expression and I believe all this.  Where the monkey and the wrench and the gears get put in the same room and start punching holes in the walls of my head is the apex between my inspiration and my self awareness. 

  I haven't done much for art in two weeks, or three.  I have to reming my self to not feel a certain nagging guilt or paranoia that once the engine cools it will never start again. "Are you avoiding your art?" a friend of mine asked me as she walked up to the porch last night.  It was me, Ben, beer, and the shadows on the mountains.  I laughed, it is all a person can do sometimes, when you just don't have an answer for the riddle.  So I sit there letting the tidal waves build inside me; I want big canvass, fresh smooth and ready to dance the color; fined form, in value, and it's speech!  I want to bury my head in Prussian Blue and breath Crimson!  I want to cut out my heart and use it as a stencil to paint an arrow to You!!!!!!!!!!!!  Do you get the point?  I don't have the canvass, the paints still are covered in caps and lid and all that remains is to sit on the porch and laugh with Ben.  It is summer time, the flowers are our party favors and we smile as if it had always been this way!