Tag Archives: coping with change

Altered Horizons 43

Altered Horizons 43 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a fabricated landscape in dealing with depression and coping with loss.

Is there anybody else out there who needs to live by a body of water? Long ago I used to leave the bathroom sink half full for my depressed cat who loved the dripping and dipping into water. Besides the old cat and myself, there must be others who crave water’s calming, cheering, and mind-cleansing effects. After decades of living next to ponds, what will happen when I move away to a place where there’s not even a bathtub? Someone please tell me how my obsession with water might then be quelled. By hanging huge photos of the ocean on my new walls? Or by keeping a tiny kiddie pool on the new patio?

Anticipating the move, I’m creating fake seascapes in Photoshop, pasting together images of objects that reflect light. Like the zigzagging running-board of a tractor, metal ductwork, and silvery-painted chiseled wood. Maybe I can make something look like a lake. So I can fool my brain when I no longer have a pond to gaze upon.

Altered Horizons 43

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Altered Horizons 40

Altered Horizons 40 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a fabricated landscape, a bodyscape, from a human face.

Making a landscape from a human face. I thought I’d try this, at least once. So I took a negative image of an old classmate and pasted it onto a mackerel sky. My effort was going well enough until I tried to add scattering, the fine white haze that one sees at the horizon. That lightening up of the sky at the farthest point one can see, just before it disappears beyond the nearer more solid landform, has always drawn my focus. But I guess I should have highlighted it more subtly. My photography instructor, who knows all about capturing light and making light work, wasn’t buying it.

Altered Horizons 40

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Altered Horizons 38

Altered Horizons 38 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops fabricated landscapes in dealing with depression and coping with grief and loss.

In the next year or two I will move away from my house by Moonbeckon Pond. The thing I will miss most is my view of the sparkling pond right outside the large south-facing windows. A hundred times each day, my eyes rest on that sight; from the early morning light until the darkness of nighttime, the sight of that pond calms me. The place I will move to has no water features. The landscape consists of row upon row of attached houses and parking areas. When I no longer have my pond to gaze upon, in order to soothe my sore eyes, I will need to have created landscapes to hang on my new walls.

Although this scene was collaged in Photoshop using items of sentimental value—a foreground made up of several shots of my kids’ old dog-robot toy, a sky crafted from grillwork in Australia’s Old Melbourne Jail, a moon that is from the bottom of a bowl of my mother’s that’s been with me over half a century, and a frame pieced together from drainage strips on the doorstep of my current beloved home—this is not the landscape that will settle my soul.

Altered Horizons 38

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Altered Horizons 24

Altered Horizons 24 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a uselss non-functioning fan into a sun in a fabricated landscape as she recovers from side effects of her COVID booster.

The day after I got my COVID booster I could barely move. There was no way I would be able to do anything useful. Feeling old and sore and exhausted, I hung about the house hoping no one would find me in my embarrassingly lifeless state.

At Cornell’s Hydroplant, days before, I’d photographed this old fan. It was standing still in the middle of the churning, pulsing, loud busy-ness of the place. Everything around it seemed shiny and polished. But dust and debris clogged the fan’s blades; it looked like it had been sitting there useless for decades, like it would never be able to function again. The ancient thing wasn’t performing, wasn’t contributing. It wasn’t even particularly beautiful. Why was it there?

Lovingly, in Photoshop, I turned it into a huge sun taking up all the sky.

 

 

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Altered Horizons 21

Altered Horizons 21 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York photoshops fabricated landscapes to heal from child loss and depression.

For most of my life I was searching for someone, wishing for someone. A soul mate, a partner, my other half—maybe. But recently I decided that I, myself, could become that person I was hoping to find.

In these fabricated landscapes I compose, often it just seems like something’s missing, like there ought to be a sun. So I concoct a sun of sorts. It’s not the same as a real one, but it fills space in an empty sky. And it satisfies my need to feel the scene is complete.

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Altered Horizons 20

Altered Horizons 20 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops fabricated landscapes in dealing with depression and coping with loss.

Long ago, someone told me I shined like Christmas. Even though it came from a stranger, I have never forgotten those words. Better than being told I was beautiful, “shining” was something I believed I was capable of. For years after, I did shine. I radiated, loved and was loved back. These days, though, I mostly feel worn down and chewed up. Like the light in me has been extinguished.

My friend shakes her head at me, “Why are you photographing the worst-looking plants in my garden?”

“They’re more interesting than the perfect ones,” I said. But it’s more than that. I’m drawn to survivors, to the ones with scars who, though maybe not always beautiful, have a mighty shining about them anyway. It might be evidence of my still unbroken hope that, even in the wormiest cabbage, I can see a sun.

 

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