Category: Still Life
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Pear on Stone | East Wenatchee, WA | August 2019 A skyscraper stuns in design and complexity, but so does a garden gazebo. A 20-ingredient stew bursts with flavor, but so does trout sautéed in butter. Jackson Pollock’s complex art mesmerizes, but so does a Chinese painting of one blade of grass. An object’s shape…
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Green and Red | East Wenatchee, WA | August 2019 Yes, I sometimes arrange vegetables into curvy designs. Don’t you? “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way — things I had no words for,” said American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (d. 1986). She’s known, of course,…
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Hives | Twisp, WA | August 2019 Some bee colonies create a buzz you can feel in your bones. It’s a sub-aural phenomenon, more vibration than sound, that pulses from certain types of hive architecture and hidden nests. For me, that buzz isn’t the joyful bzzt-bzzt of bee busy-ness. It’s more of a gut warning…
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Antique Dolls | Spokane, WA | August 2019 What sparks dread? I had a friend in college who shivered at the glowing tip of any extinguished candle wick. “Spook eye,” he said. A co-worker in New Orleans never walked through alleys. “Something’s in there,” she whispered as we avoided a shortcut to lunch. “Something bad.”…
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Corn | East Wenatchee, WA | August 2019 Some of us await a new crop of sweet corn with anticipation once reserved for an arriving circus. (The same excitement shown now for the latest iPhone.) Pickup trucks parked roadside sell ears plucked just an hour earlier. Corn connoisseurs (yes, those exist) peel back the husk,…
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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:
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Statue’s Hand | Odessa, WA | June 2019 Hands tell tales. Their age spots, large veins, calloused fingers and folds of skin chronicle our triumphs and failures. More than faces, which can be creamed and tightened, hands hold evidence of life lived. In the grip of struggle; in the clutch of
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Strawberry | Pasco, WA | June 2019 Small things reflect big things. Spiral shell = spiral galaxy. Leaf veins = river delta. Strawberry = supernova. “To see a world in a grain of sand … hold infinity in the palm of your hand,” wrote poet William Blake. The more we wander, the more we
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Sage Trunk | East Wenatchee, WA | April 2019 A retail clerk — a woman of about 65 — told me her husband died last year. “At first, it was hard,” she said. “I found myself drifting.” But she soon discovered that a lack of direction allowed her to grow in any direction. Now she
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