Capturing the Mind's Eye

Untitled (so far)
Photograph, June 2010

A-D-D - I'm afflicted with it - Artistic Deep Desire ( to create).  Doesn't matter what medium - something catches your attention and the mind goes into hyperdrive thinking of ways to express itself.

Take the above photograph.  I was watering my spathyphilium yesterday and noticed a yellowed leaf at the back of it. I pruned the leaf, and discovered that half of it was brown but still soft, and the other half was a  glorious golden yellow.  (The leaf, by the way, is about 8 inches long and three-four inches wide at its widest.)

What to do, what to do? Well, I'm an avid photographer, so I took it into my studio and placed it on my shadow box, which is black.  Turned on the small spotlight and looked through the viewfinder, and 56  photos later looked up from the camera.

I think the juxtaposition of the clean hard lines of the glass perfume bottle with the organic softness and intense colour of the leaf go well together. The details of the veins and the silkiness of the browned areas is amazing (sorry you can't see it here, but my original photo is 79 Megabytes in size, and doesn't upload well).

I also had some VERY dried Poinsettia leaves, with amazing textures, that I photographed.  These leaves had shrunk from about 4 inches in length, to what you see here - the final size of these leaves was just under one inch!  There were about 8 leaves in my 'collection'.  I took many photos of varying combinations of these leaves, and this is just one of the resulting photos.

I'm trying to decide whether I want them to stay as photographs, or whether I will express them as paintings.  Oils, coloured pencil, maybe watercolor?

Ah, A-D-D --- the possibilities are endless.  This is so much fun!