Canvas to the Imagination

It’s been a few weeks since I shot this portrait with Siobhan so I can no longer remember where the idea came from to use balloons as a prop. There is a store around the corner from my apartment that sells about a million different things including balloons that you can get filled with helium, which was lucky. I really enjoyed buying the balloons for the shoot. Walking home with them looped tightly in my hand I felt like an excited little kid and I wanted to run and skip along the sidewalk while laughing out loud. I’m glad balloons can still feel so joyful even though I’m a grown up.

Siobhan was an excellent model and working with balloons made us both laugh a lot. I decided to scrap the original idea I had in mind for this shoot – Sio standing on the chair and floating with the balloons – because I didn’t want to go all crazy and photoshoppy. Also, despite the fact that the ceilings in our apartment are about 12 feet high, I STILL didn’t have enough room to compose things in camera that way I wanted.

I’m having a lot of fun inviting lovely female friends over to my home studio to pose for me. Everyone has taken to my invitation with enthusiasm so far, despite any misgivings about feeling unphotogenic. For this shoot I put together a flickr gallery of balloon images take by other photographers. You can check it out here. I really like using the new gallery feature for inspiration.

From the Free Will Astrology Newsletter:

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): “I burn for no reason, like a lantern in daylight,” writes poet Joseph Lease. I think that’s a succinct formulation of one of your central issues, Leo. Burning for no reason, like a lantern in the daylight, can be the cause of either failure or success for you, depending on subtle differences of emphasis. This is how it can be failure: When you’re mindlessly and wastefully burning through your prodigious reserves of fuel without any concern for the benefits it may provide you and others. This is how it can be success: When you are exuberant and self- disciplined in shining your light and radiating your warmth just because it feels so good and so right and so healthy, and without any thought about whether it’s “useful” to anyone.

How’s that for a kick-ass weekly horoscope…?

It’s really frustrating when I spend a lot of time working on something and when I’m done I don’t feel happy with it. That’s how I felt about this altered book Wednesday afternoon after spending most of the day on it. I felt the composition was too busy and I’d managed to completely de-emphasize the book part of this altered book because pages and bookish elements are mostly hidden. I stepped away for awhile and was able to look at it with fresh eyes later. Now I like it. It’s very different from the other altered books I’ve created so far.

I’d been trying to come up with ideas to make further use of the bag of wooden animals I picked up at a garage sale. I used a tiger and rabbit in a previous work, and chose the bear this time with the thought that it’s posture resembled that of a performing bear. I went looking for a rubber ball for the bear to balance upon and then remembered I had a set of circus-themed paper dolls in my stash of ephemera. And with that, a circus book was born!

Materials used in this book: book, tissue paper, recycle paper bag, wooden bear, rubber ball, stars, circus-themed paper dolls, thread and needles.