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I work abstractly and non-linearly – however, my designs do have trends over time, usually with the goal of delaying recognition so a photograph may better dialogue with its viewer, free of labels. Recent techniques have included seeing without gravity, designing in soft focus, and using shapes to continue the photograph beyond the physical frame. My photographs reflect a more prosaic approach to photographic seeing ~ a fascination with the everyday, a preoccupation with the vernacular, an "ordinary," rather than an "extraordinary" vision. I value finding my ideal of beauty and decorum in nature and the simple life. There may be other, more descriptive or poetic words that may be used to define the “pattern” that connects the images, but the simplest meta-pattern is this: I take snapshots of moments in time and space in which a peace washes over me, and during which I sense a deep interconnectedness between my soul, the moment and the everyday world around me. My current projects are polar opposites, evolving abstract design in both natural and urban environments.

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Dante and Divine Comedy




The Divine Comedy is composed of over 14,000 lines that are divided into three canticas — Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise) —

The poem is written in the first person, and tells of Dante's journey through the three realms of the dead, lasting from the night before Good Friday to the Wednesday after Easter in the spring of 1300.

The Roman poet Virgil guides him through Hell and Purgatory; Beatrice, Dante's ideal woman, guides him through Heaven. Beatrice was a Florentine woman whom he had met in childhood and admired from afar.

In Hell and Purgatory, Dante shares in the sin and the penitence respectively. The last word in each of the three parts of the Divine Comedy is stelle, "stars."

The number 3 is prominent in the work, represented here by the length of each cantica.

Dante provides his readers with a spiritual map and a moral compass.

Frustrated and dismayed by his own sinful ways and the growing corruption that he saw around him, Dante hoped that his visions of Heaven and Hell would prompt readers to return to a righteous path just as Beatrice had hoped that Dante's journey would deliver him from sin.

To this end, Dante made the lessons of the Bible accessible to his contemporaries by drawing a graphic yet clear picture of the punishments awaiting them in Hell and the rewards found in Heaven.

Through the questions that Dante poses to his guides and the spirits that he meets, readers find answers to many of life's most difficult moral and spiritual questions.
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