IrwinFoto

A gallery of photos by Mike Irwin

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Category: Landscape

  • Bark Marks

    Bark Marks | East Wenatchee, WA | March 2019 A Native American legend claims that aspens and birches got their distinctive markings when a spirit escaped her evil twin by hiding inside a hollow tree. Its bark, perfectly white, was forever scarred by the demon’s angry claw marks and lightning bolts. Hmm, maybe. I’d rather…

  • Baling Twine

    Baling Twine | Twisp, WA | April 2019 Things pile up. It’s not too far-fetched to claim that a primary law of life is Accumulation. Books on shelves, dimes on dressers, hairs in drains. Or heaps of memories, blessings, regrets (college sweethearts come to mind?). I like to imagine that our ranching neighbor has tracked…

  • Quail

    Quail | East Wenatchee, WA | April 2019 We see what dangles before our eyes. That’s easy. But don’t you sometimes sense there’s more? That maybe something exists behind the everyday veil, out of focus, beyond reach? When the light is right, my peripheral vision catches

  • Tulip, Study #5

    Tulip, Study #5 | East Wenatchee, WA | April 2019 Flowers wallow in attention. After all, they’re the flashy wrappings of the tulip’s sex organs. All lushness and lust. So I felt bad ignoring the plant’s workhorse systems, the leaves and roots that provide the food and nutrients that make those beautiful blooms. It’s a…

  • Mallard

    Mallard | Greensboro, NC | April 2019 We can immerse ourselves in beauty without a trip to the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. Sometimes a dog leaping for a tossed ball satisfies the need for wonder. Sometimes birdsong mixes perfectly with friends’ laughter to create

  • Fields

    Fields | Spokane, WA | April 2019 Aerial views of fields give insight into a farmer’s mind. Such as, the geometry of her planning and depth of her thinking. How fertile

  • Landscaping

    Landscaping | Richland, WA | April 2019 Because rainfall here is scarce, we pay particular attention to solitary plants. Same for our late-life friends. We focus on cultivating relationships that

  • Beach Art

    Beach Art | Newport, OR | March 2019 Look closely at this photo. See the faces and bones? Creatures and claws? It looks like a charcoal drawing by a surrealist artist, but it’s really a patch of beach etched by flowing water. More specifically, it’s art created in sand as a creek seeks its original…

  • Cloud

    Cloud | Methow, WA | April 2019 A lesson in impermanence appeared in a cloudless sky. As I drove upriver, I saw vapor gather into a wispy sphere that grew denser by the second. The quickly-formed cloud then floated east, carried along by the forces — wind and whim — that conceived it. The airborne…

  • Idle Hour

    Idle Hour | East Wenatchee, WA | March 2019 The publishing industry is flooded this spring by a wave of self-help titles on doing less. The books are a reaction, I suppose, to our increased pace of life — do more, do it faster — all juiced by the latest tech. In truth, experts say,…