Looking Up/ Looking Down

I have a renewed interest in photography. I happened upon the Shutter Sisters website the other day, and for August there is a theme for each day, for their "Elevate the Everyday" photo project. I decided to try it with my little point-and-shoot camera.

Vintage postcards, hanging on a mobile in my piano studio.

Blue + Lines.

Dead tree in August.


I love these little Fluxus/ Keri Smith-type projects: the art of the everyday; simplicity over complexity; d.i.y.; anti-commercialism. I can handle these small, daily art projects in the spirit of John Cage (whose 100th birthday would have been September 5 of this year):

"[The residual purpose of art is] purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life-- not to bring order out of chaos or to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord."

and Paul Klee:


"It is a great difficulty and a great necessity to have to start with the smallest. I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing, about Europe, ignoring poets and fashions, to be almost primitive. Then I want to do something very modest; to work out by myself a tiny formal motive, one that my pencil will be able to hold without technique. One favorable moment is enough. The little thing is easily and concisely set down. It's already done! It was a tiny, but real affair, and someday, through the repetition of such small, but original deeds, there will come one work upon which I can really build."

A three-year-old's tableau ("looking down").

Belly/feet/dog.


This project is coinciding nicely with my media fast (can't....take....any.....more.....ridiculous/sad/irritating....news....for....awhile......). I feel much more uplifted reading Hula Seventy's blog.