Digital Self Portrait

The pool near Beecher Ridge is a two-hour hike down the mountain from Matthews Arm. I chose this mountain woodland setting because I grew up in the Shenandoah Valley and I love the mountains. That is where I feel the most grounded, most at peace, and the most connected to a universal unity of life. However, not just any mountains will do. Last year I was able to visit the Andes Mountains in Peru. As breathtakingly beautiful as they are, I didn't feel the same sense of belonging there that I feel in  my little blue mountains.

The imagery I chose for this self portrait is deeply personal. It represents change, recovery, and the powerful importance of people in my life. Three years ago my fiance died suddenly. It is his reflection in the water. I first put only his reflection in the stream, but that didn't express the whole of the loss. So I added my reflection to his. 

Right after his death, I felt profoundly disconnected from life. The reality, which I had come to know as my life, had suddenly ceased to exist. That is an indescribably strange place to be. Being translucent and drifting in the water might come as close as anything to describing the feeling. Fortunately, I had my son, Tristan, and some wonderful friends.

Tristan was five when he sat under the sugar maple tree and tossed handfuls of leaves up in the air. He is twenty-two now, and finishing dual degrees in English and philosophy. He and I have frequent, engaging, long talks. He has been an anchor for me. My friends have also been anchors for me. They kept me company, kept me involved in things, and made me eat. I have represented all of them in the picture of Lena, who is seated on the rock in the background. Another anchor for me is beauty, the beauty of Nature: wild columbine, harvest moons, katydids, the smells of rich, wet earth and fresh-cut wood, walking barefoot on carpets of plush moss, listening to wind in the treetops--all things I love.

The image of me in the foreground is a more recent photo. I decided to use an oil paint filter on it because I've had to, in a sense, re-create myself. It's an ongoing process. The image of me in the center of the picture was part of the original photo. When I started the project, I had planned to cover it or remove it. Later on I realized that it could represent my emergence from a dark place into the bright world of possibility. So I decided to leave it in.

SOME TECHNICAL STUFF:  I actually did this project twice, because I let a friend (who insisted he knew what he was doing) talk me into using a lower resolution to save my photos. That turned out to be okay, though, because I really need lots of practice doing this stuff. One thing that I did on my first attempt that I forgot to do on the second was to slightly decrease Lena's opacity. Doing that made her blend in better with her surroundings. I also wanted to create a gentle swirling effect in the water to break up the reflection images. I couldn't find an application in the GIMP program that would do that. The filters in GIMP are not nearly as nice as Photoshop, either. I would like to have done a better job of fitting Tristan into the scene. He looks too pasted on. That kind of finishing touch will just take more practice, I think.

Color Sketch

This is much more fun to me. I don't feel so much like the technology impedes the process. Of course, what that really means is that I need to keep getting more familiar with the technology. I am intimidated by the technology stuff. I can do more with a stick in the dirt most of the time. But I actually like drawing with the tablet.

tablet drawing - eye

My very first tablet drawing... 

You have much more control than I expected.

I like it a lot.

I just love to draw.

It was fun to try drawing with something new.

Relic

One might be put off by her gingham and ruffles. There is a primitive
awkwardness about this woman. She is out-of-style, but she is not
outdated. Her talents can be approximated, but never replicated. Her
feet are in two worlds. Her kitchen has both a wood cook stove and
a microwave oven. Radium is no more or less to her than an ingredient
in her tonic to cure angst. She is a book of old stories, whose brittle
yellowed edges are migrating inward on the pages.

A small disruption in a major power grid might one day bring things to
come. Her stories could be rewritten on clean, white, pliable pages. No
more Abercrombie and Fitch on that day. She will teach you how to
grow and harvest flax, then how to ret, dry, seed, break, scutch, heckle,
spin and weave it into sheets of linen. She and the few others of her kind
will be the wellsprings of hope in a desolate age.

SOME TECHNICAL STUFF:  This looks like a six-year-old cut it out of a magazine and put it together with glue stick. I hope I can figure out how to do better than this.