Living Memory

As I type my father is undergoing an operation to remove a metastatic brain tumor.  They tell us we could know as early as tomorrow where the primary cancer is.  That will be a huge relief since not knowing has been the scariest part of this experience.  I’m dealing with it through my art.  Hopefully I can stay focused through this project but today I decided to forgo classes since I’m freaking out pretty nicely at home.  In an effort to stay calm I’ve started looking through the photos I took of him this weekend.  No matter what happens he won’t look like this again for a long time.     



   



 

Bridge Series

One of my favorite places on my grandparents farm is a wooden bridge.  To get there you had to leave the main yard and go into the pasture (sometimes goats or horses were out here, but mostly just rabbits and deer).  The grassy path was usually cut fairly short because my grandmother has a horrible fear of snakes.  You go almost to the middle of the pasture and then turn down a fairly good hill before the land levels out right up to the creek.  It was so far from the house that it always felt kind of magical.  And the fact that there was this long exciting trek leading to a bridge with no visible path on the other side made is mysterious.  When you get down there nowadays all you hear is the wind in the trees, hounds baying in the distance, echoing off the mountains.  Most of the birdsong is hushed and there’s a pleasant tension as if the forest had been waiting anxiously for you all day.  My grandmother (who is rumored to be Fae herself) used to tell stories about fairies in the woods, and maybe there are.   2003  Spring 2007        Winter 2007      Winter 2007     Winter 2007     Winter 2007     Winter 2007     Winter 2007 

Lions and tigers and…flamingos?

I had a lovely trip to the zoo today.  We went an hour before closing (4ish) so the light was awesome.  I had a lot of fun “shooting from the hip” you could say.  I took a zillion pictures of everything I saw.  Here are my favorites.         

Something like James Dean

I’ve been really slack about even getting these photos into my digital portfolio but I finally remembered to do it.  This is from my final last semester, a series inspired by James Dean.  We had a lot of fun with these shots and there are some I can’t quite find yet!  My boyfriend is famous for hating his photo being taken but I think I changed his mind. He really started to enjoy the work… hope it doesn’t go to his head!  I’m considering a series using my best friend (the girl in my first post) and he but I haven’t really fleshed it out in my head yet.    ”A little to the left”  ”Rebel Without a Cause”  ”The bad boy, from a good family”   ”Restless”

Mema Stories Picture #2

My grandparents until this year have managed to keep up a fairly good sized vegetable garden.  They are in their mid 80’s.  A large part of my childhood was spent praying for rain, and then regretting it when it came and I had to “work” the garden.  I’m kind of sad that my children won’t get to be a part of this culture because I’m afraid it will just be dead by the time I get any.  My parents most likely won’t keep a vegetable garden when they retire and move up here and let’s face it my grandparents (contrary to popular belief) aren’t going to be around forever.  So towards the end of the summer after we’d planted, prayed for rain, dug up weeds, picked endless ears of corn, bushels of green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, ochre, salat, blueberries and whatever else they planted we had to do something with the excess.  This is excess after we  gave away to various friends and family members literally hundreds of dollars worth of produce (this is true organic produce mind you, and have you seen the price of blueberries lately? Outrageous.) My grandmother would spend about a week canning vegetables, making jams and jellies, and freezing anything else we couldn’t eat.  By this time  if I never ate another fruit or vegetable until the next summer I would have been perfectly fine.  She has a wonderful story about making jelly and jam you can read here  ”In the summers of my childhood I learned to depend on Mother Nature and her bountiful gifts”. 

On a personal note:

Unrelated, though not completely, is a situation involving my father.  Right before thanksgiving he experienced difficulty writing and spelling at work.  Our first thought was that he’d had a minor stroke.  Doctors ruled that out but not before postulating on the possibility of numerous blood clots or some other cardiovascular problem.  They also told us he had less than 1% chance of a brain tumor.  Friday we discovered that he has a brain tumor.  It’s cancerous.   In fact, its a metastatic brain tumor which means that it has spread from some other part of his body.  We don’t know to what extent it has spread or even what it is.  It’s hard to focus on art and my future at a time like this but I’m sure he wants me to.  I’m considering doing a series I’ll call “In Living Memory”.  It’s not completely formulated in my head yet but I’m hoping I can preserve the way his life is now through photographs and maybe (if he’ll let me) follow him through his treatments.  It would be by far the most personal project I have ever undertaken.  I welcome ideas or support and hopefully I can post images as I get them.

Mema Stories Picture #1

I took a combination Women’s Studies and Southern Studies course last spring entitled “Southern Ladies Lives”.  We read memoirs by several women, mostly african american, who had grown up around the turn of the century in the South.   What I discovered was that there was a vast shortage of material from poor white southern women.  So I undertook as a final project for the class and now a personal project of mine to write about one great southern lady in my life.  My grandmother, who I call Mema, was born in 1922 and grew up in the first depression and started her adult life at the beginning of World War II.  Her stories are rich both in content and language.  She’s lived her entire life in Pickens, South Carolina surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains and her Scotch-Irish heritage.  It has been a great joy of mine to experience this culture and I hope through my own art to allow people to see it as I see it.  Here is one of my favorite photos of my grandparents farm.  Mind you, this was not done out of aesthetic reasons as much as the necessity to keep things orderly.“For a large family the washday was just that an all-day-long job for Ma and me. ”(For more of this story click here) 

Catching Rain at Night

This is one of my favorites from last semester.  This is my best friend, April Ruiz.  She is trying to get into modeling so we have a nice partnership that involves both of us building our portfolios.  An amateur photographer herself, we’ve been working together since high school and it’s always a blast.  Here we were shooting at night in a major shopping center.  It had just started to rain and as she held her hand out to judge how much longer we could be out I told her to freeze.  It was just too good to pass up!  Unfortunately I have technological issues with scanning in the negative so I had to work with scanning in the actual print.  It could be better quality wise…but you get the picture

En Garde!

I’ve never really worked in digital or color at this level before.  I’ve been working with black and white film since high school and I’ve been kind of intimidated.  I don’t know why.  Honestly I’m having a blast figuring it out.  My early graduation present was a Canon Rebel XTi from my parents.  I’ve literally been walking around taking pictures non-stop of whatever I see.  Luckily I see some pretty interesting things! No honestly my entire family has a complex about throwing things away.  Especially at  my grandparents.  You never know what you’ll find at their house, which is where we discovered this fencing mask.  My boyfriend was snooping around and put it on insisting that wherever there was a fencing mask there had to be a sword.  Okay well his logic might work somewhere else; not here.  But I’m so glad I had my camera with me because it was worth remembering!