On Sunday mornings when I was a kid, my father would take my sister and me out flying in his small airplane. Gazing out the window, over the noise of the airplane engine I would sing Susie Little Susie, an old folksong about a poor girl and barefooted geese that couldn’t afford to buy new shoes. All the while I picked out tiny houses or teeny-tiny individuals down below us. “God bless the people who live there,” I’d say, from up above the world. I felt very privileged and close to God up there. And, though I hadn’t experienced the loss of anything greater than a goldfish or two back then, I knew that everyone needed someone praying for them, needed someone watching over them. Feeling fairly secure, I sent out love and blessings to strangers.

These days, I pick out bits and pieces of my photographed images to create small worlds in Photoshop. Maybe it’s the calm or maybe it’s elation—something about what goes on in my head when I’m photo-shopping reminds me of flying over the world in the back of my father’s plane. For this fabricated landscape, I pumped up the blue color of a slate slab so I could make it into a river or a bay. I paired it with a mossy patch of ground I found in a Maine woods this summer, to create a fake aerial landscape.

Altered Horizons 73