I completed the image above almost two months ago, but I did not post it until now partly because I sense it to be a departure from whatever I’ve been doing before. Or, to put it another way, it suggests to me a change has taken place, or is in progress. Something shifting in my response to the sense of mystery I relish in the world, and I’ve been at a loss about what to make of that.
The image is constructed from parts of six different photos. What kicked it off was the photo I took of the tree, which stands at the corner of Castenada and Montalvo Avenues in San Francisco’s Forest Hill neighborhood. Dr. Google tells me it is a Pohutukawa Tree, native to New Zealand, distinguished by its orange aerial roots. During the days of pleasant, meditative effort it took me to pull the tree, pretty much pixel by pixel, out of its “actual” Forest Hill background, thoughts about elements that might be arranged around it came to mind and the image above evolved.
When the assembly was complete, I liked it a lot, but I also began to feel that the aerial roots … the feature of the tree I found mysterious and had attracted me to it … seemed a bit of a distraction from what I came to feel was the overall tranquility of the scene. In my thoughts, on this occasion, the prospect of tranquility was eclipsing mystery. That awareness seemed to me to be something I needed to reflect upon, and it was still on my mind yesterday when I came upon a couple of things while cruising the web that seemed pertinent in an oblique, associative thinking, sort of way. My relationship to mystery felt a shake.
In an interview with former NY Times art critic Roberta Smith, she remarked, “Artists cannot control the meaning of their art. They can’t possibly encompass it all if they’re good. There’s stuff left over for generation after generation to deal with.” I have no pretensions to artistry. Rather I think of the stuff I do, and the way I work, as an attempt to allow my unconscious self to find expression, and sometimes permit a glimpse of an internal horizon that is at once a little more distinct, yet ever retreating … chasing meaning of a sort that seems for a moment to be in my grasp, then skips teasingly out of reach again.
In December 1882, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, “Sometimes I long so much to do landscape, just as one would go for a long walk to refresh oneself, and in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul.” I think one of the things that especially drew me to that quote is that four weeks ago I began working on another image, and again the star of the show is a tree. This time one I photographed in San Francisco’s Dolores Park. Progress is slow because the shot includes a goodly expanse of the tree’s boughs with the sky visible through a gazillion gaps in the leaves. I’ve determined that I need to punch out all patches of sky from the tree shot so that the sky in the image I’m currently thinking of placing behind the tree will show through realistically. This sky-purging process, which feels meditative and I’m enjoying immensely, will likely take several more weeks. And it’s looking like the outcome will offer tranquility transcending mystery to an even greater extent than in the image above.