Vermonster

I left my pugs at home and took a day off from work today to travel to Ben & Jerry's in Waterbury to watch two of my best friends' sons and another friend of theirs eat a Vermonster in a little over 20 minutes. According to Wikipedia the Vermonster is a large ice cream sundae consisting of 20 scoops of icecream, four bananas, four ladles of hot fudge, three chocolate chip cookies, one chocolate fudge browning, 10 scoops of walnuts, two scoops each of four toppings of your choice and whipped cream. It contains 14,000 calories and 500 grams of fat. The boys were real troopers and no one vomited. As fun as it was to watch them, to me there was something about standing there with my two bestfriends from childhood watching their children do a silly stunt like we so often did. I reminded my friend Sheila of the time we skipped class to eat a gigantic bucket of onion rings at the local snack bar, Onion Flats. My other friend, Madelaine and I, used to pretend as kids to have these imaginary children and today I saw her two beautiful boys just having a blast.

 

I returned home tired, although all I had to do was watch, to find that my own "Vermonster" Waffles had managed to continue her great crate moving escapade and this time had repositioned it at least five feet away from its original location. I don't know how something so little can accomplish something so big -- today was obviously the day of great feats!

Light and Shadow

I snapped this shot of my two nieces at play earlier in the summer. I love the contrast between the two girls, Catherine, in front, dressed in shorts and tee shirt, running in full tomboy glory. Tori in the background, a little girl striking a grown-up pose. It is another one of those pictures that could make adults uncomfortable, but this was not posed. I was lucky enough to catch these two little girls playing in the light and shadow, offering a glimpse of their many facets, reflecting the women they will one day become.

The Carnival

Opened up my picture folder tonight to find some photos to accompany my post and instead found a photo I had taken of my niece Ellie right after she was born. I had been working on creating a textured background for the picture and began to play with it again. Suddenly I remembered some images I had from the Tunbridge Fair and a new photo collage was born. This is only a draft, I plan to print it out and definitely draw, maybe embroider on it. We'll see.

Come Ellie to the carnival
The merry-go-round of life
Enjoy Ellie the Ferris wheel
Spinning boldly forward in time
Dance Ellie past the funhouse
mirror reflecting who you are
Laugh Ellie at its distortion
Grab the gold ring
Be the star.

Connection

Children, like animals, have a language all their own. It takes getting down on their level and intently listening and watching to begin to understand it. The major difference is that while animals are always speaking "animal" even when we don't know what they are saying, the language of children is even more esoteric. Like fairies and other magical creatures, the inner world of children seems to evaporate if it comes in direct contact with that of an adult. Still, there are ways to glimpse it. One must be very quiet, so as not to spook them and to stay on the periphery and observe. I can capture their language, their world, better with my lens than my eyes because it is so fleeting. it hints at the future, of the people they will become.

In the moments when their secret world becomes visible, there is a maturity, a strength, and yet, also a vulnerability that makes adults uncomfortable. We often prefer our animals and our children to be cute, cuddly, juvenile. They are more complex than this. They have inner lives that we are not privy to -- thoughts, emotions and ways of playing and being that are foreign to us. The miracle with both children and animals is that sometimes, somehow we connect with what we do not fully understand.

Shadows and Light

My sister-in-law Gretchin brought her sister and niece to my grandmother's pool this evening where we all enjoyed the day's last rays of sunlight. I took some lovely images of Gretchin's niece, Julia Grace, in this light. The shadow picture on the left and the middle portrait are not manipulated in any way. The final panel on the right I am making into a collage and this is the draft of it. I thought the three pieces went well together, so I added some text and tried them as a poster.

The text reads: "Shine little girl in the darkness and the light. Your shadow warms the waning sun. Your eyes hold its receding rays."

View from the Porch - Correct Orientation

As promised, last night's pic in its correct position.

Kaleidoscope

My latest collage. I call it Kaleidoscope.

Mermaid-Collage Draft

Hi, I've been getting a lot of new subscribers to the blog, for which I am very thankful, but I realized that many of you do not know much about me. In addition to being a certified "Pug Slut" -- it seems it's agreed upon now -- I am also a writer/teacher and a photographer/artist. I've been having a lot of success lately in showing and selling my collages, which along with my photographs I post here from time to time. Don't worry, pug lovers among you, just as they do in my life, pugs have a way of showing up in my work as well (as you can see in this picture here).

I thought I might share with you all a little bit about my process. This is an unfinished draft of a collage I have been working on for some time. It is a difficult piece because in order to capture the ethereal nature of the water and the mermaid the figures need to be intentionally blurry, but I still want something for viewers eyes to grab on to. I work from "recycled photos" -- digital images that may not quite work as stand-alone images, but when manipulated in Photoshop can really tell a story. I then print out these images and draw, embroider and whatever else I think will provide a more three-dimensional aspect to the piece, before scanning them back into Photoshop and manipulating some more. This is my sixth version of this collage and I have yet to print it out to work on it. The first version featured the girl alone. I wanted to add a companion and put in the pug on the righthand size of the image, but where I originally placed it, it looked as though he and the girl were engaged in some unsavory business (I'm not that much of a "slut") so I moved him around and added another and have been playing with the piece ever since. There still needs to be something going on in the left hand side and I have some ideas, but I thought I'd share it with you now as a work-in-progress. And, don't worry, there's still another pug post to follow later today!

Hand Collage-Casting a Spell

I wanted to post more tonight, but ran into computer problems and had to rely on my I-pad. I did want to share this photo collage, however. It did not make it to the Pig Barn Show (It was difficult choosing which ones to bring there), but it is in keeping with some of the images that I have been sharing lately. I seem to have become obsessed with children's hands and the way they hold objects. I was looking through my collages tonight and realized that my niece's hands were a focal point of this collage. Here, she holds a looking glass with a little witch inside. It was surprising to see that this theme has been showing up in my photographs and artwork so often. To me her hands are so relaxed and yet so composed in this picture. They were just waiting for something to fill them.

Joy in all Seasons

I snapped this picture of my niece, Tori, playing in the hay. She was enamored with it, shouting "My hay, my hay!" I couldn't get over how happy it made her. Editing it tonight, it reminded me of a picture I took last year of my niece, Catherine, playing in the snow. We had taken a walk in the fresh snow when she just reached down picked up a pile and through it in the air. Both girls seem lost in a world of bliss,