Each to Her Own

This.

Chipped paint.

Texture.

Weathering.

I need it.

Don't ask why.

I don't know why.

I just need it now.

A Plea for Forgiveness

Dear K T

This is to say 
that I photographed 
your store's walls

cracks, crevices, holes
moldy paint chips
broken stucco chards 

My act may 
distress you as
much as one 

other business owner 
many years ago
but please know

my fascination in
in decay's beauty
expresses my reverence 

You Can Take a Girl Away from a Family Business

but you can't take her out of her obsession with paint.

I stopped here because I could smell fresh paint through an open shop door.

front

and back

And here because I love the paint.

And here too, just around the corner.

And here because of the way paint ages.

It's in the genes.

Ghost Signs

Along the top of the building, housing an expensive ice cream shop and art gallery, a ghost sign announces Gilman Paint, TOOLS, CEMENT. Whoever preserved the buildings along the north side of the river in Chattanooga respected the past while updating interiors for the present.

Every day, I am reminded by such ghost sign reminders of the "old days," not the ones only my parents or grandparents talked about, but ones I remember and even younger folks do. Just the other day, a former student sent me a funny video of two children trying to put a tape in a parent's Walkman, something I never owned but the generation below mine certainly did.

Perhaps out of longing for people long gone or nostalgia about my own childhood, I love these ghost signs for the same reason I love weathered brick and wood: like wrinkled faces or ropily-veined hands, they wear their age well.

Flow!

The thing about making something is that the more I do it, the more I want to do it, and the more I want to do it and the more I do it, the more likely I am to make something new.

Yesterday's and today's metal and paint shots inspired an Aha!

The next time I shoot a single something odd and get a snap that I really and truly like, I will challenge myself to find other subjects on the same theme, until I take a photo of some other odd thing, . . .

. . . and today, I found it quite by accident.

Plastic!

Confession

As the child of, sister of, and aunt of paint manufacturers, I confess this: I love paint -- the tantalizingly acidic smell that sticks in my nose hairs; the pockety-pockety-pockety echo of a working ball mill; the thick swish of large paddles swirling pigments in waist-high mixers; the metallic clang of lids pressed onto cans; the thunder of 50-gallon drums, turned at an angle and rolled along the floor; the rhythmic passes of a printing press; the splotches of paint on concrete floor and machines and work clothes and painters' caps and skin. Short of standing in a factory making paint, placing my hands on a shuddering paint shaker is a meditative joy unlike any other.

And the shaker itself is a delight to the eye.

Off-Label Usefulness

Like some prescription drugs,

a lens hood can serve unintended purposes.

Bench Warmer

I Betcha I Can't Just Take One

I climbed down both banks. On both sides of the lake. I leaned over the bridge and shot blind. I lay down and curled over the lip to shoot what I saw. I broke a twig off a bush because it was in the way. A passing friend walking her dog ignored me, as she knew she should. I slid down the bridge toward one bank. Then toward the other. I shot and shot and shot.

Why?

Because the bridge, the pilings, the peeling paint, the rust, the leaves, the water, the reflection, the day so beautiful.

Here are a few of the many.

Technicolor Viscosity

I
Saturdays at the paint factory: rocketing pocking of the ball mill, seductive smell of turpentine and linseed oil and mineral spirits, splattered concrete floor, and giant mixing vats. If lucky, I'd be there when master mixer Joe Locascio poured pigment into pigment, swirling color in a vat paddled and tumbled like heavy cream, becoming whipped, only heavier. Childhood never smelled or looked so good.

II
Florence, Italy: paper marbling and marbled paper in generations-old binding shops. One across from the Pitti Palace, Giulio Giannini e Figlio, sixth-generation artisans crafting peacock patterns on hand-milled paper. Mote-dusted light pours over desk sets, flat papers, the air charged with the scent of leather and glue, a veritable toy store for a lover of color and pattern and paper.

click here for the online source

III
The work of artist Mark Lovejoy: photography and glorious color. Tonight, I shall be dreaming in technicolor.

click here for source

Making a Garden Grow

The word palette, according to Dictionary.com, derives from Old French, the diminutive form of pale or shovel, resulting in small potter's shovel. A spade with which the painter mixes pigments, grows new colors, and plants them on a prepared ground.

Today, the palette at my feet invited me to do otherwise: hold it against the beautiful blue ground of sky. Imagine, then, a flower barrage bursting and floating above our heads in brocades and confetti streams and bouquets of intense color.

A garden of the imagination fit for another bitterly cold day.

Weathering

The former dairy building/sculpture studio now serves the renewed University farm, but the wood has not been renewed, a choice I welcome. Boards wear well what's left of their blue paint, peeling and revealing faded cornsilk yellow. Chips, striated and buckled, lift and flake like the tree bark stripped at a saw mill so long ago.

The pigs just across the lane fatten in the pen, the goats across the street stand on hind legs to strip leaves from vines along the fence, Claire's horses in their neighboring pasture pull at grass and stamp and steam on now-cool mornings -- and time moves and time stands still in paint's slow peel.