Here's another one of my digital composites. This one combines about 160 images, taken during a half hour or so in the Boston Public Garden last week. The humans are all blond females. I'd been planning a picture like this for almost a year, and I don't even like animals, although birds are okay.

Yaddo

I was stunned when I opened the envelope from Yaddo yesterday. It had the word "pleased" in the first paragraph instead of the usual "sorry." I'm invited to be a guest at Yaddo next January! Yaddo is an artist's retreat, an old and famous one. Philip Guston, John Cheever, Robert Lowell, and Clifford Still stayed there in the past. Recently Miranda July, Rick Moody, Jonathan Letham, and who knows who else have been guests. I'll be there for a month with nothing to do but work. It's maybe the fourth or fifth time I've applied, so there.

Squirrels and the Baroque

I've been planning this picture for a while. I don't really like squirrels, so I wasn't sure when they were most active, although I thought it was spring. That turned out to be right, so I did this picture last week in the Boston Public Garden, which is right near my work. I brought out some crackers to lure them into the frame, but otherwise they took stage direction poorly. (I would have liked some squirrels smack in the middle of the trunk.) I find this picture fairly creepy, which I like: as if nature is conspiring in plain sight. Formally, it kind of looks like a Gaudi building or Baroque sculpture, which I also find pleasantly creepy, as if the figures are frantically trying to wrench free of the marble. Coming later this spring: a pigeon picture.



Bernini's Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi