I don’t want to live on the moon; the light is too beautiful right here on earth.
In my fabricated landscape of the week, a tarred road and its shoulder become the sky and land. In the sky I pasted an image of a Queen Anne’s lace flower that many consider to be an invasive weed. I think it makes a magnificent moon.
Being reflective was never one of my talents. Rarely would I look back at things said or done, examining actions and motives, realities versus perceptions. Not my own, nor another’s.
And now, stepping into the role of grief group facilitator, I am having to develop my skills at reflective listening, responding to the thoughts and feelings I sense from the communications of another, so that the speaker feels heard and understood.
Focus on the other person’s message and feelings. Don’t make judgments. Don’t offer advice or my own perspective, I remind myself. But I’m kinda like an old upended tree trunk, absorbing the wet and warmth, and impervious to almost everything else around.
In Photoshop I turned the reflection of trees and clouds in my pond upside down for this fabricated landscape. Definitely not paying respectful attention to what lay before me.
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No one could quite identify the huge tree at the far end of my property. It was surrounded by the thickest thicket and wetland scrub so we could only view it, its top, from a distance. For years I’d wanted to mow up to that tree but the land was too swampy to get anywhere near with a mower. Also, the field was riddled with the downed trunks of huge trees, cut when I built my house at the turn of the century.
In the middle of the heatwave and dry spell, the landscapers agreed to try clearing the field. It was one of those days when I hardly dared to go outside for fear of being fried. But the landscapers called to me, they’d reached the tree. (Although the bulldozer had half sunk in the still-wet land.)
It was a shagbark hickory. My favorite for photo-shopping fabricated landscapes. Snaking around behind the tree was a small murky creek. And under the tree’s canopy were two rocks, large enough to sit on. I greeted the shagbark like I was meeting a long-lost loved one.
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The reflection of the sun on my pond always teases me to photograph its sparkling, sometimes blinding, beauty. The problem is I usually over-expose the whole picture just trying to capture, on film, the beautiful patterns the sun makes on the rippled water. So here I inverted the image into its negative in Photoshop, turning the bright whites into black. Then I changed the colors from the blue-greens of the water to a pale pink sky. Enthralled with contrasting textures, I condensed a large heap of dried grasses into the land for this fabricated landscape.
Shut up in the house during the hottest days of the heatwave, I find creating landscapes in Photoshop to be a great distraction from loneliness and depression.
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Another combination of algae and peony. In Photoshop there’s this great command that allows you to change the hue, intensity, and lightness of the colors in your photograph. There was something so satisfying about turning my pink peony and greenish algae into a fabricated landscape of blue twilight. I like to imagine walking in the dusty blue valley as a pale blue moon rises.
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The algae I pull from the pond almost daily is heavy and saturated. It drops from my rake in thick wooly sheets that often contain tiny snails or squirming baby turtles that wriggle their way back into the water before I can photograph them. The heavy dumped algae, drained of its water, seems to drink up the light. It is such a contrast to the peony with its soft, delicate petals reflecting the sunlight and fluttering slightly in the air. To me it’s like the difference between life and death, elation and depression, a luminous moon and a messy muddy swamp.
In Photoshop I combine algae and peonies over and over again in fabricated landscapes.
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