Growing Versions

A lot is unknown. A lot is known. I do not know exactly how much I do not know. But I know what I know. Steer clear towards what you know, don't let the unknown scare you off course.

When I first lived in Halifax, and having known it as a visitor all my life, it never really occurred to me (or us as its inhabitants, let alone tourists) to visit the waterfront. Even though it is a historical port city, the waterfront was neglected and hard-working but not really a source of leisure.  That all started to change within the past twenty years. Now, even though it still works hard receiving and transmitting goods, it has emerged as a destination for tourists and locals in and of itself. Before this development, I had a vantage point on my city and over time, those vantage points have changed. I used to know my city from inside a classroom, snowbanks and apartments and houses.  Now I know my city from the harbour's edge. I gaze towards George's Island or am dwarfed by huge vessels coming and going. Even when I am not there, I visualize the city from that vantage point.  The waterfront helps stabilize us, its a point of connection and helps us escape the...

We are born with a way of seeing the world. It is partly shaped by where we are born, to whom, who we are raised by and who educates us, but it is also the product of our unique circuitry--an alchemy of all the dust that has produced us. We can decide to see things other ways for the good of others or for our own reasons, but we have to remember how we see things too. Our way of seeing is a fingerprint, proof that we were at the scene of our lives.

Looking at things close up sometimes makes things unrecognizable. My tendency is to zoom in when I take pictures, and afterwards, I sometimes have trouble believing that what I am seeing is the same thing I took a picture of. I guess I do that in my life too. I tend to thrive in one on one relationships and focus how to make what is right in front of me work, but lately, I have begun to realize that I need to zoom out so I can properly see things. Zooming in with the lens is soothing, and I guess it makes things more manageable in life too, but an aerial view has its role. I don't know how to operate a drone but I can find some people who can. I can learn.

We have art in order not to die of truth.-Friedrich Nietzsche

After months of slogging through slush and watching my footing through icy patches, I came to a moment, a brief gift of time, when all of that feet watching was forgotten, and unnecessary. The time had come to look up.

As I walked by and craned my neck longingly to catch of glimpse of the growth on standby in the public gardens, I realized that I was looking into a mirror of sorts. No matter how I tried to see that part of the gate differently, I could not unsee the "mirror". It made me feel better about all the churned up stress of the day that I thought was the only thing inside of me.

Before I started taking photographs, or whatever you can call the outcome of taking pictures with an iphone, I heard about photographers falling in love with light. It is a well worn cliche I thought, but now that I have been regularly taking pictures I am starting to get it. There is a light that I love. A light that the house creates at certain times of the day.  When I see it, I drop everything and find my phone and start taking pictures. I know it when I see it now.  I wouldn't be able to get there scientifically, but the house permits the light and I accept it when it is available.

I made jam. I smoked a cigarette (just one). I stared at the stars for a long time. I mean, really stared. I sat and simply looked up. I read Archie comics and spent most days in my bathing suit. I floated and dove and picked peas right out of the pod and strawberries out of the field. I ate picnics at every meal. I cleaned with bleach. I re-decided what music I like. I told my son he was clever because he had spotted a creature in the woods. He responded, "I used my vision." I used my vision. I shut my eyes. I turned off every tap. I let my vision lead the way.  

 Industries and economies rely on us seeing weeds.  What would happen if economies relied on us seeing seeds instead?

Without fail, each time I go to look for the same file in my computer, I see the intersection beside my son's preschool.   When I start a basic multiplication question in my head, I see the gymnasium at my old school.  The image sits there patiently in my mind's eye as I (slowly) work out 12 x 12. When I try to remember which vaccine my kid needs next, I see the lush green soccer field, then I see it. When I think about my password for one of my accounts, I see the same mailbox, jutting out of gravel. How does visual thinking work for you? Sam and Friends: Visual thinking (Jim and Jane Henson, early 1960s)

What if you woke up in the morning to a whole yard covered in heaps of play dough? What if you could slide down a hill of gobs of play dough? What if you could form a giant dough fort? I know, it would be great.  That's what I thought as I willed my toes to retain feeling this afternoon.  All this malleable snow is like play dough on a grand scale.

" The colour orange is my favourite colour.  The only one that has a fruit and a colour name." "I like orange because it's red and yellow.  I like those colours too because red and yellow make orange." "White and orange makes a shadow, but it never comes out at night."  "Sometimes you can't see orange because it might be too light or dark, night and day, rain or shine, snow or fog." -Guest blogger, Molly

This morning we were greeted by frosty grass and crunchy, icy leaves. The Christmas parade put us all in a hot chocolate frame of mind. The icy frost has properties that crumbly leaves and sugary sand do not. I am coming around a bend, my thoughts crystalizing, as the water solidifies while we sleep.

"What I've discovered is that in art, as in music, there's a lot of truth-and then there's a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It's the moment that the audience falls in love."   Lady Gaga "There's a robot.  Do you see Mama his big eyes?  He's a tall Robot and he is right over there."  Do you see him?  Have you seen him before?  I was pleased to realize that I could. When I was about 6 or 7, I occasionally used to lie on my back at the foot of my bed and stare up a patch of stucco on the ceiling.  Repeatedly and for what seemed like ages at a time, I would stare up at a cluster of tiny peaks of stucco that I could see with my 6 year old eyes was a little village inhabited by little creatures (half human, half smurf) marching around it.  It was animated enough by the tiny shadows cast by those t...

Stress always makes me see things like one sees things underwater. It is like a buzzing, flickering fluorescent light that distorts the way I perceive things.  Tiny, manageable details become overpowering, magnified and refracted as they are through my bulging eye ball, puffy with stress. Meaningless glances or happenings appear threatening.  I struggle with keeping perspective during these periods and I am currently trying to prepare a strong counterweight in my mind, so I can have a safe place in my mind to retreat to when this happens again. Then I came across this quote and it reminded me that refraction can work for me, not just against me.  "The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it tra...

Coraline  is an impressive movie.  It is not only a beautiful example of animation, but also a powerful tale that easily hooked into my imagination.  Coraline lives in a house that is attached to another house (like ours), except the other door leads into another world that is similar but not identical  to the world Coraline knows. Through the other door, her parents look similar but they have button eyes and there are a host of hall-of-mirror-distortions for her to wrap her head around and ultimately escape.  It seemed initially like a benign enough movie for a then 6 year old.  We watched parts of it here and there, always stopping short of watching the whole thing right to the end.  It was a bit of a novelty in her mind for a long while that she had watched most  of a scary movie. However, one fateful day last summer she watched the whole  thing, from start to finish.  It turns out that its persuasive powers are strong and...

Mama's legs, 2012 I let the kids loose on the camera on the weekend.   My personal favourite was the portrait of me by my almost four year old.    Castle, 2012 Backyard, 2012