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Abstract a.k.a. Whimsical Musings! : I'd like to die during sunset, a stunning, fiery, red-emblazoned open sky - the kind you get to see in Arizona, Utah, Montana -- big spaces with big skies! We'll see if I am to be that lucky! My ashes - no finer place to disperse them than Big Sur, on the Pacific Coast in Northern California with Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture blaring out loud and then one 'big' party to celebrate the departure of my spirit to that 'top secret, classified meeting grounds of kindred spirits'! No, I have never been preoccupied with 'death', just aware of the certainty of it. In fact, as I approach 40 next year, I sense a certain quickening - of the mind, of my heartbeats, of being more courageous and wise about sifting through the unending to-do-lists to focus on the really important stuff - I did that yesterday - took the time to visit with a friend of mine 30 miles away, sat on the porch swing and drank wine - and then the neighbors joined us and there we were 'touching each other's lives' and having a celebration of the ties that bind us, anchor us, together and bring richness to our days. These photographs are my promises to Mother Earth and Father Time - that I have 'not' been speeding through life hurriedly and frantic, but that I 'listen' to the 'voices in my head', or 'to what my rice krispies tell me', or 'the tea leaves at the bottom of my cup' -- that I 'see' in the beyond, and in the within, and hear - well - of course - both the infra-and the ultrasonics - from the low droning of whale sounds while diving in the Pacific to the ear-splitting lightening strikes in the tornado-alley in Kansas - all sounds that rattle me out of any complacency my 9-5 teaching job may manage to beguile me into. These abstracts are therefore - the 'more real' of things in my life, and my wish is that such abstracts always hold their realism for me until that fateful day in the future ... when some ashes will find the wind in the Pacific, with lilting notes of Tchaikovsky's 1812 piece and a bunch of colorfully-dressed people eager to get home and drink some very fine vino!.

Abstract a.k.a. Whimsical Musings!

I'd like to die during sunset, a stunning, fiery, red-emblazoned open sky - the kind you get to see in Arizona, Utah, Montana -- big spaces with big skies! We'll see if I am to be that lucky! My ashes - no finer place to disperse them than Big Sur, on the Pacific Coast in Northern California with Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture blaring out lo ...

Updated: Aug 07, 2008 7:06am PST

Fragments of Color - Abstract expressionism of rocks. : These photographs are one of my attempts at blurring the line between science and art! All of these images are of paper-thin, transparent/transluscent slices of rocks photographed with pure 5500 degree Kelvin, white light in a microscope. I use a industrial rock saw to cut a hand-sized piece of a rock, then trim it with a oil-cooled saw with a diamond blade after which I glue a square chip of the rock to a glass slide using a special epoxy and 'cure' it with heat. Following that I hand-grind the slice with a series of grits until the slice is about 30 microns thick (a.k.a. barely visible!). I then use a 'petrologic microscope' with a special adapter tube that acts as a 'close-up bellows' and attach my 35-mm SLR film camera onto it and take the photographs. The 100 ASA film is then developed normally and the prints scanned. Magnification used is 40x so the entire area of a 600x800 pixel image is just about the size of a pencil point on the glass slide! I do not use any artificial coloration of light or materials in these photographs; all colors are how they appear under plane polarized light -- meaning light vibrating in only one plane - similar to what polarized sunglasses do - the cutting-out of the glare is what intensifies the colors that are already present in such slices of a rock. The other way to understand this is to think of a thin, colored (let's say light green) plastic sheet. If you hold just one such thin sheet against a light source - you'll be able to see the light green color, but then take a stack of a 1000 of these sheets together and what you then see is almost black/opaque. What I am doing with these photographs is a kind of "reverse engineering" with starting out with a 'thick mass of a rock' and just slicing it very thinly to get to that elusive 'thin sheet' of its composition - a thin-ness that allows for its inherent colors to become more visible. I like to think of this work as 'parting the curtains'! Enjoy!

Fragments of Color - Abstract expressionism of rocks.

These photographs are one of my attempts at blurring the line between science and art! All of these images are of paper-thin, transparent/transluscent slices of rocks photographed with pure 5500 degree Kelvin, white light in a microscope. I use a industrial rock saw to cut a hand-sized piece of a rock, then trim it with a oil-cooled saw w ...

Updated: Aug 07, 2008 7:11am PST