Art and vessel

What is it that I want to portray with art? Yousef Karsh showed people's souls through stillness in portraits, Henri Cartier-Bresson through the "decisive moment" in candid B&W photos. Eve Arnold used available low light and muted color in her outdoor photos. 

How do my experiences and influencers show up? Outdoor photos with available (often low) light. Trying to show how light falls or bounces. Stillness, except for the motion of water. Romantic. Pointillism.

I'm more serious than funny but have a sense of humor. I carry fear, anger, and resistance to authority. I love learning, nature, connection, reflecting.

Taking the photos gives me a kind of focus outside myself, as does manipulating them. What about my photos would/might move someone forward to new understanding? Patterns - repeated shapes or shadows, details of a flower. 

Being in-between: not one thing nor another but a third concept, upside-down and backwards (a.k.a. contrary) to most people. A solitary mystic who revels in contemplating and exploring the biggest ideas about the universe and how we fit into it. How the parts mirror and reveal the whole, how the whole has to be considered in individual decisions and actions and why it is so very necessary to consider the "other" or "othered": social justice, responsibility, compassion, bridges.

What are some ideas to explore? Chaos. How the physical items I have show who I am? Quaker history of Indian boarding schools; reconciliation--started a conversation about creating something like an “Acknowledgement of Traditional Owners” statement but am leaving it to season with time and to let elders discuss the idea.

I feel so distant from the book and my chapter. Maybe that's what my pictures show right now - that waiting emptiness. The paths without a center of focus - just the open path. Maybe that's all I can be right now - a vessel. An unoccupied bench, a reflection in the water.