mineral paradise

this site has a lot of wonderful photographs of minerals, which i love to look at. here are some favorites... most of the dimensions of these pictures are in millimeters. while i mainly enjoy them for their variety of form, abstract beauty and strange echoes of other forms throughout nature, i also like to imagine these little worlds exist on a far grander scale - surreal landscapes to wander around in and feel lost and amazed and have adventures.

























sorry there's so many, but the navigation on that site is sort of awful, it's possible i'm doing you a favor...

lithospherics

i know that we have little earthquakes here all the time, but i've only ever felt one noticeably, when it jolted me awake from a nap. sometimes i think i'm crazy for choosing to live on a faultline, surrounded on three sides by inevitably rising oceans. this isn't the most original metaphor, but san francisco is a little bit of a spider's web - dangerous, beautiful, easy to get lost in. i often forget about the rest of the world in this town.

once in a while, such as last night, when i'm drifting off to sleep, i seem to feel the earth giving a gentle shudder, causing my home to rattle faintly and startle me awake, heart pounding. i'm sure sometimes i'm right, just as i'm sure someday it really will be the big one.

above, "shaking" by richard phillips

ox eye moon

i did a little rambling over here the other day: artheadsf.blogspot.com about the above collage.

blunt-leaved milkweed

air, land, and water elements growing as one here

i'm really enjoying this new series so far

fall forward

fall is my favorite season. it took me a while to get the feel of them here in sf, the rhythm of the seasons is much more subtle. i felt a bit in limbo for a while without the changing of leaves and temperatures and then snow... but now i can recognize the colder nights, the rainy season, the wearing of boots and closeting of sandals.

with fall comes the holidays, and related festivities... tonight, i'm part of an expedition to a corn maze... a brief flickr search revealed horrormovie-esque shots of corn stalks flash-illuminated against the night sky, and dripping signs proclaiming "field of screams". overhead shots of corn mazes look basically like crop circles. should be a pretty good time.

above, two favorite old photos of fall in the northeast kingdom

flowers in ultraviolet

these are photos of flowers in ultraviolet: pollinating guide patterns not visible to human eyes.

natural light:



same flower, ultraviolet light:



another flower, natural light:



same flower, ultraviolet light:



same flower a third time, ultraviolet flourescence:



lovely stuff, my favorite kind of science.

a version of this post was posted previously in a blog i'm no longer using, sorry if you're re-reading it, how dull for you

furry frost

these here are pictures of false fungus frost. this is an extremely rare type of frost which is apparently formed by water freezing as it is pushed out of the wood.





so bizarrely beautiful.

i love how the top one has a warhol part in it.

there is a lot of great information about different kinds of frost and snow crystals in general here.

final note on frost (maybe); i have two beautiful photos of window frost up in my home which were taken by my good friend maria, i need to have them framed; here's one:



a version of this post was posted previously in a blog i'm no longer using, sorry if you're re-reading it, how dull for you

haunting

opening the door to go into the ladies' room at work this morning i had a brief premonition of encountering a ghost or dead body behind the door. this happens to me frequently, to the point where i half expect that at some point i really am going to have a ghostly visitation, or discover a dead body. generally i have these moments when opening doors to small windowless spaces or while wandering about in nature/swimming in natural bodies of water. i blame the excessive amounts of mystery! i used to watch while growing up (particularly lots of poirot).

anyway, this morning's ghostly flash got me thinking that most likely at some point in history, someone (or something) did die on the honorable spot which happens to now be the restroom of my employment. i mean, it's probable that things have lived and died on every square inch of this planet, all kinds of living things, for centuries. so now i'm vaguely pondering what, and how, and when; how many various incarnations each patch of earth has survived / what myriad of life cycles have played out upon them. makes me think of guest books.

painting by francis bacon

flock of blades

vote for nathan cordero

he is an awesome artist and one of the nicest people i've ever met

stan brakhage

i love watching these, especially while listening to music like melodium.

black chokeberry

what were butterflies, growing from what was a sprig of black chokeberry.

i've been wanting to explore a new direction in my work for some time now; specifically, i want to develop my abstract works and use this method to create landscapes. i experimented with this for the "cold hands, warm heart" series, and felt happy with the results. i also felt i'd grown out of the overtly violent imagery which i was using to balance the saccharine quality i think some of my source material has, and instead changed the source material itself. for the next phase i think i am going to avoid most narrative aspects altogether. try to break elements down a little more, in order to build them up new.

i think there is a book at green apple that i didn't get yesterday, which i will go back for. might be perfect for upcoming things; finding beauty in the grotesque.

construction zone

went to sfmoma yesterday to see the joseph cornell exhibit with audrey. she gave me an awesome glow-in-the-dark resin cast insect keychain which i'm going to make into a pendant (which is what she did with hers). thank you audrey.

the exhibit was fantastic, i don't think i'd ever seen his works in person before. my favorite one was called "deserted perch" ~ it was rather sinister and haunting ~ but i can't seem to find an image of it online, unsurprisingly.

after that we made our way over to green apple books, we both found some good things. their sale outlet is right next door to park life where i saw some of zachary rossman's works for the first time, hadn't heard of him before. they are beautifully executed and, as park life puts it, "woefully infectious". i like how he sews pages together.