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Full Circle
Bozeman, Montana
2023

…almost anyway.

Why Santa Needed Rudolf Last Night
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
2023

“Then one foggy Christmas Eve…”

Bare Tree #120
Cape Arago, Oregon
2023

Much like the nearby sandstone formations, this piece of driftwood mimics, in it’s own way, the effects of ocean waves and water on it’s shape. In this case even to the point of also mimicking the shapes of the crashing waves themselves.

Shore Acres #6
Cape Arago, Oregon
2023

Shore Acres #5
Cape Arago, Oregon
2023

Having recently spent time in and amongst the sandstone formations of southern Utah, it had me thinking again of the section of the Oregon coast we visited earlier this year that surprisingly (to us) had some similar and in its own way unique formations. So I’ve gone back to do a bit of comparison.

The Visible Man
Sand Island, Utah
2023

Those of us of a certain age may remember the Visible Man (and Visible Woman) “toys” from back in the day. I put toys in parens there because they were sort of marketed as such, especially around Christmans, but also were billed as simply anatomical models for educational purposes. Anyway, this petroglyph comes across to me as kind of an Ancient Puebloan version of the same thing.

Mark and the Moon
American Prairie, Montana
2023

I read an article in the Washington Post recently titled “This once-in-a-generation Rothko exhibition is spellbinding“. I was amused, perhaps a bit bemused even, reading the author’s gushing enthusiasm for Rothko’s color field paintings. Myself, I find them certainly eye-catching (which they are to some degree simply because they tend to be huge), very colorful (of course), and perhaps surprisingly (to me anyway), pretty memorable given their somewhat excessive simplicity. If you ask me to quickly name one notable exhibit room at the National Gallery of Art in D.C., the Rothko room in the east building would immediately come to mind. They are not at all my favorite works at the National Gallery, but some of the most memorable nonetheless.  So, it is not surprising that, even though he would never have put something so literal as a moon in his paintings, he came immediately to mind just now when I was going through my photos from our trip to American Prairie last month and came to this sunset photo. If you also saw this photo and immediately thought of Rothko (perhaps after making note of the image title but without reading all this description), then you know what I’m talking about when I say his paintings are memorable if nothing else.

Triggers
American Prairie, Montana
2023

Nothing particularly special about this sunset photo. In fact it’s quite mundane–except that it triggered some memories for me (as photos, smells, sounds, etc. often do). In particular the colors and the trees reminded me of a photo I still have tucked away somewhere of a very similar sunset view looking up the hill to the west from the front porch of my grandparent’s house on their farm outside of Lyndon, Kansas many years ago. That blurry old photo in and of itself is even less special than this one, except to me, because whenever I happen to come across it, it reminds me of all the good family times and adventures that were spent at that farm decades ago.

Creation Myth #6
Bozeman, Montana
2023

At one point while working on the composition for yesterday’s Last Flight Out post I tried placing this winged Vitruvian Man in an orb in the landscape. But it didn’t really fit in with the general theme I had in mind for that image; which was, by the way, one relating to global warming and its accompanying uncontrolled wildfires, as well as the rather desperate national and international political situations we find ourselves in these days–all from which you can try and run but you can’t hide. But with the Vitruvian Man it did occur to me I could turn the theme around 180 degrees and present a scene depicting the rather blank slate of an imaginary beginning, or after yesterday’s image, perhaps a new beginning.

Last Flight Out
Bozeman, Montana
2023