Lovely colours in this image, Brian - and a lovely softness in the edit that makes the fade of the ‘disappearing’ figure very effective to my eye. The beetle so sharply focused in foreground makes me wonder what role s/he has in the story — overseeing? Something to do with the refuge the human figure is seeking?
PS I’m with you on the text version - for me, the text is too strong and definite to work with the idea of quest/search for refuge - imo works much better as the title.
I wish I could say I have a strong coherent understanding of what this means. Instead I have fleeting glimpses of elements that seem to bear some importance to me and maybe what it means when I put them together. Of the several elements I chose to work with, and still exist on layers that were shut off, these are the ones that remain. I suppose there might be more mystery in a picture where questions remain.
My starting picture is a fairly dense forest but perhaps it has become too faint to get that. The darkness was a bit oppressive so I had to “lighten up” a bit. The person is disappearing into the forest, but the second, less substantial, image of the character implies the passing of time, and becoming harder to see. Does this represent the disappearing self or becoming one with all that is?
The person in the picture isn’t me. I couldn’t find a suitable picture of me so a picture of my brother had to do, but that change of character also changed the story as I was in the middle of telling it.
In a deep forest you can’t see very far where you are going or where you have been. You can only see where you are now. In the overall philosophy of “be here now” there is something to that.
I don’t know if you recognize the foreground flowers. Forget-me-nots are fairly well known here. They grow wild and are often planted. Where they grow I have an excuse not to mow the grass until they have finished flowering.
On one hand forget-me-nots have some romantic connotations, perhaps of lovers separated by distance but still not wanting to be forgotten. Or of lovers having a long view of love and wanting to remember and be remembered forever.
Unfortunately, in a couple of fund raising campaignes the Alzheimer’s society mailed out seed packets of forget-me-nots, to my way of thinking, in an annoying attempt to co-opt the forget-me-not as their own symbol. Well, hey buddy, make up your own symbol and don’t mess up any of mine. As annoying as it is, the co-opting is at least successful enough that I think of my father and others I have known who were afflicted with Alzheimer’s when I see forget-me-nots and that makes me sad to see my old enjoyment of the wildflowers be taken over by a new sadder meaning.
Each time I mow, I have to decide whether to mow them or let them grow, what meaning I want them to have, and when is a flower just a flower.
So, my character has passed through the forget-me-nots, or the field of remembering, on his journey into the deep forest. Forget-me-nots are fairly shade tolerant so they can grow at the edges of the forest until the shade becomes too deep.
What does it mean when the only person/thing/being bearing witness to the journey is a beetle, even though it is one with unusually large sensory appendages. It implies some sort of solitude or perhaps loneliness, or even isolation, deliberate or not. And even in this solitude are we ever really alone?
So these are the elements that have woven themselves into my picture story. Without knowing exactly how these elements came to select themselves I can only look at how they fit together and wish I was smart enough to have been able to plan it in advance.
Looking back I wonder at what subconscious processes are at work when looking through thousands of images and which ones say “pick me, pick me”. It’s amazing to me how each thought leaps to another and how they are associated.
What do you make of that, doctor?
This also reminds me of something I wrote recently about the difference between imagining a story and then discovering you don’t have the elements you need to illustrate it, compared to looking first at the elements you have and then seeing what story can be told with them.
