Friday, July 11, 2008


Jo-Ann has appeared on this pages (screen?) in other occasions. Here is one example. The cardoon and its association with thistles here. Jo-Ann has more or less been showing up at my studio once every couple of months on a Thursday at noon. Our "theme" is to take pictures with only one theme or item. We have used cloth ribbon and an old Hollywood light as in the example seen in the link above.

Today Rosemary, Lauren, Rebecca and I visited John Tuytle's small sheep farm in Langley. That he has an ancillary interest in roses is what took us there. John also grows the best Eryngiums in Vancouver. I have featured the plant twice here and here. Tuytle cut me some of their flowers to bring home. They might make their appearance as scans here soon.

This evening I went to Focal Point to see a photographic exhibition of my students' work. There was so-so work and there was superlative work. There were pictures, as an example a cow grazing near a housing development that had significance if my student explained as he did that the cow was in the former pig farm in Coquitlam. The photograph made me think that there are some pictures that attract us without any explanation and some photographs that don't affect us until the explanation behind them is revealed.

It is sad to realize that there will be at least 16 new photographers who will be competing with me for the shrinking photographic dollar. I took with me the metal foil wrapper of a roll of Ektachrome 120 transparency film and I asked my students to guess what was in my closed hand. One student was close when she said candy rapper. Had I said that what was in my hand was yellow and blue (the colour of Ektachrome boxes and wrappers, would not have made the guess any easier in this digital age.



At the end of the day I feel like one of those Mexican turtles who is compelled to lay eggs on a beach (no idea if the turtle knows that fewer than 10% of the eggs will survive to be hatched. I feel this compulsion of meeting with Jo-Ann every once in a while and going through the excercise of taking her picture undraped. Is there any purpose any more for this sort of thing? The fish end of the original Starbucks siren is long gone and sanitized. Do the pictures here of Jo-Ann (the few that I can post without breaking my self-made rule of not showing nudes (overt ones) have any meaning without the explanation that I posted them today because the eryngiums at Tuytle's farm reminded me of thistles even though the thistle-like appearance of eryngiums does not make them so? Is the hidden meaning of these photographs just a manifestation of a compulsion of mine that I follow simply because I can?