remembering rockport seaport
February. 12. 2012
"There either is or is not a way things are.
The color of the day. How it felt to be a child. The feeling of saltwater on your sunburned legs. Sometimes the water is yellow. Sometimes it's red. The color in memory depends on the day. I won't tell the story the way it happened. I'll tell it the way I remember it." - Mitch Glazer (Adaptive screenplay for Charles Dickens' Great Expectations)
I love you, my hope
November. 24. 2011
Purple sunset on a crisp evening walk with a friend today- unaltered I swear!
Friends often question my exuberance, asking me what makes me a happy person and I struggle to articulate that happiness is a spontaneous state of being. The list of reasons I rattle off when questioned begins with having breath and consciousness, but inevitably ends with the love I find everywhere.
I remember walking to my student job, tired and beat on an ordinary Louisiana afternoon beaming in the bliss of just being there, then. I remember tearing up in waking meditation simply feeling “So much joy! So much love!” That is the ecstasy of being- what is joy but synchronicity with existence and its magnificent flood? Even when it’s bad, it’s good- it’s all good. Happiness is a state of mind, I choose to exist in joy through and through the shit. And the love I have for and get from my family and friends, helps me shine on- they are my hope.
This Thanksgiving I am evermore grateful for you beautiful people who keep my life whole. Forget the miles between us, I feel the sweetness in you. I love you, my hope- Happy Thanksgiving!
elemental
June. 14. 2011
thinking in charcoal for an imagined bath house…
i have about a thousand charcoal sketches of the frigidarium, tepidarium, caladarium, you-name-it-arium lying around dying to be scanned, or better yet, built.
the thing about the sea
June. 10. 2011
I am my family’s self proclaimed memory keeper, even though I arrived last.
This is Daddy and Aku at the beach, in a world where I didn’t exist, photographed by my very young mother. It’s a strange thought- the world without you in it- perhaps because no memory of it has survived in the stories we are become…even so, it seems to stay afloat whether we drift in or out
I think she was scared of the ocean, even wrapped in a sailor’s arms. So it looks to me they just stood there a while, toes in the sand. And that’s the kind of father mine is. Patient, and ever so gentle, he may just be kindness personified.
Happy coming birthday, Ak…we’re all missing you on it already : )
“The thing about the sea, it’s bigger than you and me,”
goes this beautiful new track, local artists Hope Trust’s throw me overboard
roadshine
May. 12. 2011
the rain came down last night to kiss the parched ground…its beauty so persuasive, it made the asphalt glow golden
ahem…that, and Oak Cliff really needs some road makeovers!
[Shot true color by the way: no sepia-ing in photoshop- the evening did it for me]
rainshine
May. 12. 2011
The most gorgeous dusk followed summer rain yesterday- it pulled me out of my house and brought me alive
silver beach
January. 15. 2011
Might be because I’m a sailor’s daughter, but I don’t care how many beaches I’ve seen, standing at the foot of the sky with an endless expanse of water is always elating.
Beaches have always been summer things for me, until I saw the snow come in close to the water, and turn the sand silver. It helps the sand soak in the clouds and the whole thing gleams…
I will always remember making this picture: my sister waiting far behind, hiding from the sub zero wind-chill around lake Michigan, my fingers numb, and my stuffed hoodie getting in my eyes as i struggled to find the shutter and wheels with those frozen fingers.
A picture, is so much more than a picture.
“We are all creatures of our memory” said Frank Welch on a sunnier afternoon to me, and I know that pictures to me are the language of my memory; thought, feeling and emotion swim in me together.
Therein probably lie the origin of my love affair with photography- browsing through fat piles of family albums and remembering through the years, feeling my ways back in time, constructing, dreaming…
down the road Ak, this one will surface too…winter beaches, sunlight, my sister’s shadow and I- set up for good pictures right there- below or above zero.
blue #2
January. 4. 2011
painted years ago…traces of beautiful times
it’s nice to look back on young work and still relish it…
blue #1
December. 28. 2010
green
August. 31. 2010
the placid backwaters of Louisiana….what we’ve fought to protect for years…
you can see why the country isn’t very stoked about losing the green to brown. there are these false BP ads running on TV about how they are committed to doing everything they can to clean up the mess- they just don’t tell you about the lawsuits that are forcing them to do so, which they fight voraciously.
ugh.
save our frickkin wetlands!
element
July. 7. 2010
…the pool at the Element is inviting. Just look at it- need I say more?
I’d shot this very frame months before the Columns shoot. On a cold winter night - somewhere between shivering and drinking wine with friends. Before the summer came… I’ll have to dig for it, but in the meanwhile, isn’t it insane how light and temperature change everything?
Check out my article [Detail Matters] in this season’s COLUMNS magazine- it’ll make ya wanna take a dip.
in the restful arms of silence
June. 11. 2010
Everyone should get away to peace, even if briefly
When I can’t, I remember and relish the times when I did…
I was thinking of the Bahai faith. If I ever go religious, this’ll be my idea of religion.
If you need a read, click the thumbnail for an old article pressed in CONTEXTURE. Just like I wrote it, back in ’06
that sink and rise and sink again
June. 5. 2010
Behold! a la technicolor!
I’ve always loved the colors on this one.
Houseboats banked along the princes gaat in Amsterdam-
I floated into a couple and befriended the owners
This writer I met there made me a character in his story…the girl who walked into people’s houseboats, he said: boundaries irrelevant to her
I don’t know about being summed up in a story, by a fellow wanderer.
But it does pay to be shameless, sometimes.
horizon
May. 17. 2010
consider it art from art…took a day out in the Texas countryside this weekend
the storms never came-
years ago, my poetic boss sent me this poem…it’ll make you fall in love with Billy Collins if the title of the book didn’t already- it’s from The Art of Drowning.
Horizon
You can use the brush of a Japanese monk
or a pencil stub from a race track.
As long as you draw the line a third
the way up from the bottom of the page,
the effect is the same: the world suddenly
divided into its elemental realms.
A moment ago there was only a piece of paper.
Now there is earth and sky, sky and sea.
You were sitting alone in a small room.
Now you are walking in the heat of a vast desert
or standing on the ledge of a winter beach
watching the light on the water, light in the air.
-Billy Collins [the art of drowning]
fold
May. 8. 2010
swimming to the sun
May. 4. 2010
…it’s a good way to go
I took this solitary beach trip to Goa a few years ago, and it was so quiet and empty and all you heard was the waves because the tourists hadn’t come in yet. I just needed the stretch, and it helped to go be a beach bum no matter how shady travel is when alone and female in the motherland.
I never swam the whole trip, but I thought about it
the day wasn’t orange- rather blue, in fact
but its memory still is
“swimming to the sun…” a friend once penned off, referring to Corbusier’s death and summing up my dreaming
and I, unaware of that story was so mesmerized by the sensuous image this little phrase conjured up in my head that even now when I know what he really meant, (and that knowledge changes everything), the visuals remain untarnished and refuse to stop flowing
Resonance.
If you know what I mean
as for this picture, I always thought that was two friends growing old together on the shore. Don’t care if it wasn’t.
that sink and rise and sink again
April. 22. 2010
When I won my first travelling fellowship, three and a half years ago, in my acceptance speech I said I wanted to travel to learn to understand the world in order to love it better, and I meant it. The timeless search continues…
Back then I studied sinking cities in Europe, relating them back to good old New Orleans. So much came from that stunt of wandering…a summer of exploration without a plan…golden surprise and magnificience!
London, Venice, Hamburg, Brugge, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Amherst and so many more in betweens…
I went to interview Frank Welch today, and hearing him talk about his time in Paris reminded me of my own. I am often haunted by the places I go…
The Paris pictures will need to be dug out, but in the meanwhile- here’s a snippet of the whole from an article we ran in CONTEXTURE (LSU School of Architecture newspaper). The large photograph is Amsterdam. More thrilling in full-color, I’ll dig soon.
The title here of course is the marvellous Edna St.Vincent Millay…how I love her.
Somehow it seems to fit-
LOVE IS NOT ALL
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
I am meant to do this forever- and hell or high water, I will.
wet land
March. 29. 2010
longitudinal section through the LA State Capitol Visitor Center project- one of my favorite drawings- the reference is to our sinking wetlands
if I could just make this building real…
ando
March. 27. 2010
Ando in a nutshell
I love that all things possess a shadow and a reflection…and they’re both such different things…
[The Modern Museum, Fort Worth]
monet
March. 14. 2010
clouds in the water
spring is HERE!!! weeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!
