Category: Portfolios
-
Storm | Twisp, WA | May 2019 Landscape Week | Memory has little respect for spectacle. As I watch an approaching storm (in photo), complete with high winds and lightning, my attention goes to a patch of reeds. They’re similar to those that cowboys (including John Wayne) used for air tubes in Hollywood westerns. Our…
-
Riverbank | East Wenatchee, WA | July 2019 Landscape Week | Trees don’t always know which way to grow. Conditions change; needs shift. What seems a direct path towards light becomes blocked, then dims, and a new route emerges. Problem is: Every leaf in the forest faces that same direction, every branch reaches upward to…
-
Crop Line | Colfax, WA | June 2019 Landscape Week | Farming feeds us in more ways than one. Land transfigured — harrow through harvest — often emerges as unintended art. Tractor tracks, crop rows, sweeps of brown, green and (later) gold. Sure, form follows
-
Wire | Peshastin, WA | July 2019 Shapes in wire fences often corral my attention. The squares, rectangles and hexagons create an overlay on reality — a grid — that allows me to focus better on segments of a scene. A door knob, a bike wheel, a neighbor’s sunglasses, the comb of a clucking chicken.…
-
Kayaker | Lake Wenatchee, WA | July 2019 Boaters moving away from shore always seem courageous. Watching them leave land to float across a fluid world — a dangerous alien environment — ranks high, I think, on a list of history’s heart-rending moments. Such as: A husband’s schooner disappears over the horizon. A warrior’s canoe…
-
Tomato | East Wenatchee, WA | July 2019 I seek ripeness, but it’s stubbornly elusive. A full ripening requires patience, and most of society — whoa, wouldja look at the time? — has to be somewhere else. Tomatoes at their ripened peak are good role models, however. Yesterday, they were pulpy potential. Today, they’re prime…
-
Chalk Tray | East Wenatchee, WA | July 2019 The playroom at a local fast-food restaurant has a blackboard hung too high for kids to use. So adults have filled it with aphorisms most children instinctively know: “Be Happy,” “You Are Enough,” “Smile and the World Smiles with You.” Oddly, someone also scrawled:
-
Under an Overpass | Post Falls, Idaho | July 2019 We’re meant to be on top of bridges, not beneath. I’m comfortable traversing chasms on a sturdy roadway with guard rails. But a walk through a span’s dim underside always puts me on alert, as if I’m trespassing in engineering’s secret world. (Stress points and…
-
View through Dirty Window | Post Falls, Idaho | July 2019 Static can fog our lives. Everyday distractions divert attention from the real world, the right now. Focus becomes a luxury. One guru recommends a Senses Census — noting in the moment what you see, hear, taste, smell, feel — to plug into the present.…
-
Fence | Odessa, WA | June 2019 Dad liked making improvements. So one summer he sent my brother and me to build a damn fence across our 10-acre field. Sweaty work for two pre-teen boys. We soon developed a combative relationship with our post hole digger. We dreamed at night about barbed wire (the stretching,…
IrwinFoto 