Infrared photography challenges the photographer to capture the unseen, the natural world that cannot be accessed by the human eye. For me, a great opportunity to capture feeling, a sense of a place. In the deep woods this morning, as I struggled with exposure settings and grew frustrated, I saw the sun light up a part of the forest up ahead, where I was was shrouded in shadow from the thick canopy overhead.
I think the camera captured the feeling of the woods, it envelops me sometimes, with its quiet beauty and shifting light.
Our friend Cathy Stewart gave us a gift of this tiny globe in a stand, I don’t really know what to call it, but I snatched it away and put it on my desk next to my muse and I love the way the afternoon light hits it, it is quite hypnotic. I think it represents a flower of some kind.
My artist wife and I are in something of a creative conflict – waged on our separate blogs about her dish-stacking habits. Maria acknowledged that what I wrote earlier was basically true – she does break many glasses and dishes but she took umbrage at my saying the stacking was done “haphazardly.” It is good to de-construct this idea, it is a window into the complexities of living with an artist, even an artist you love.
Yes, she breaks almost all of our glasses, and yes, many of our plates.
And yes, I am now driven to buying replacements at thrift shops because there is little point in buying them new. I am learning what women have put up with from men for thousands of years.
Two years ago, I bought a whole case of restaurant strength glasses off of Amazon, the reviews said they were very tough and durable, they could be dropped all the time and hold up. We were losing our glasses rapidly as Maria took over the dish-stacking when we got together. I used to actually put them away.
I thought we were set for life, these were the glasses used in diners in cities like New York!
Last week, the last of them was broken, another casualty of stacking, or de-stacking. We have killed off too many to count. I would post a photo of one of the glasses but there are none left.
Maria does not deny any of this, nor is she troubled by my mentioning it.
It isn’t the broken glasses that stirred her up, it was my failure to see the artistry of the damage. And she is not alone. Women are already writing her to praise her stacking and say they have pride in their stacking.
It is saying the dishes were stacked haphazardly that roused Maria’s artistic ire. Her stacking, it turns out, is an art form, a creative exercise, carefully planned and considered, it is an art form all of its own, as is almost everything else she does. Let the glasses fall.
And you must remember that for all of those cute photos of Maria with her pony and donkeys, she is half-Sicilian and half German. She does not take offense lightly.
This is not a stack of dishes, she says proudly, but a sculpture! “So the dishes break sometimes,” she adds, and this, she says, is what thrift stores are for. (I might add that she is not the one who prowls thrift shop aisles for cheap replacements to the quite good glasses that essentially commit suicide when they enter one of her sculpted stacks. If you can re-home and love a worm or spider, surely, one can feel something for these glasses.)
I feel guilty buying the glasses, I tell them they are doomed, I take care not to get too used to them. I don’t dare have a favorite mug.
I actually did not know until I read her blog that the stacks are a form of sculpture, – one of the few branches of the visual arts that have three dimensions – or that they are in no way haphazard, and I need to apologize for that if there is to be peace here over the holiday weekend.
Of course they are sculptures. Of course I am a dumbass and a Philistine.
Artists do not compromise on issues of art, they tend to be even more imperious than writers. I can almost hear John Updike regally telling his wife that of course his things are scattered all over the floor, he is a writer, he is making his book! And I can relate to Natasha, one of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s many wives.
When the great Russian writer typed a manuscript page he let it drop out of the typewriter onto the floor and Natasha came rushing into the room to pick it up, collate it and keep it dry and clean. She protested one day, and he looked at her incredulously and thundered, “but this is how I write!”
That was that.
And that is that for the glasses as well.
“I refuse to feel bad for the glasses,” Maria announced when I told her I was writing this piece. I call this the logic of the artist, and I can tell you, there is absolutely no point to arguing about it. It is cast in stone.
There are many thrift stores ahead of me in life.
So perhaps I am paying for the many sins of men over time. When a group of angry people stormed out of the Creative Group at Bedlam Farm one Sunday with great drama and angst, one of them e-mailed me: “now you know what it feels like to be a girl in middle school!”
Yes, I do, and now I know what it feels like to be Natasha.
This is life with an artist, it is pretty cool, almost every day. But that’s another story.
I’m still experimenting with the IR-converted camera (infrared) that Dan Llewllyn, my new hero, sent to me from his genius lab at maxmax and am humbled by the honor. I’m still experimenting with how to use it, and struggling with the exposure. I brought red filter into the woods, not sure if that was a mistake or not the photos look overexposed to me, but with IR, that is kind of the point, and I am starting to like the bright softness of the photos.
This tree trunk is one that has always caught my eye in the woods, it has a dignity and style to it that I could never capture, but I think the IR camera, a Canon 60D, caught it. Lots to learn, but this one worked for me.
This morning, Maria guided me and the dogs to a new path in the woods, one she found while walking alone. She wanted me to see a beautiful old tree, with a spring bubbling deep in the trunk, there is a pool of dark, cool water in the hold at all times. Fate came to it and drank from it, and Maria and I ran our fingers through it.
It is a mystical tree, I think, old and deep. The hole in the trunk is always full of cool, fresh water.
