Today is a holiday, at least for some people. So I took the day off to do creative things. I scanned a couple of old negatives of images I made in the spring 1982 in rural virginia. I had just got a Widelux Panoramic camera and just mostly just having fun with it as a creative tool. I had made some van dyke brown prints of them and framed them. The faded badly over the years, so I decided to pop out the prints and replace them with newly scanned, updated versions. The new ink jet prints look good as the originals before the big fade. I also decided to revisit an old concept I explored many years ago as well. I called it Dead Flowers. Each winter as the first of the spring flowers came to the markets, I would buy daffodils, tulips, whatever looked good. I would enjoy them while they were fresh and them monitor them as they fade into decade. I would then create still lives with them, mostly just to play, mostly to simply explore formal things like color, light and texture. I looked for beauty and elegance and the grace of the flowers as they died. Nothing more. A simple statement about the nature of decay. So I made a new image today with left over roses from Valentine’s Day. The process was the same. But by today’s end I had a print in hand for my efforts. No waiting for film, no waiting to see if my efforts would be rewarded with a little gem suitable for framing.
