Tag Archives: art

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Favorites of 2025

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There is something continually hopeful about a New Year. Green life grows up on degraded surfaces, and Nature asserts her buoyant purpose.

I always delight in a clear path forward under sunny skies.

Any year that included a trip to a National Park I’d never visited before is a memorable year. I saw Crater Lake in July of 2025.

City culture often centers humanity in symbols of peace. The Portland Japanese Garden contains this Peace Lantern, a 1954 gift from Japan inscribed “Casting the Light of Everlasting Peace”.

There are always unusual and surprising things to see if I keep my eyes open and practice awareness.

At the end of the year, I celebrated with my daughter in her new house, connecting past and present and future in memory, tradition, and hope.

I was inspired by Jane Goodall’s final interview last year. Her message of continuing to do good work despite the increasingly strong challenges to values we both hold dear was a rallying call. This year, current events have already served up powerful strikes against peace and harmony with Nature. I will continue to look for evidence of beauty and goodness around me and make images to record its continued presence. Thank you, fellow Lens Artists, for documenting the Art you see. It makes a difference.

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge – Looking Back to 2019: Creativity

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Lens-Artists are starting a periodic series of retrospective challenges. This week, Ann-Christine is reaching back to revisit “Creativity”. Click HERE to view my original post on that theme.

So, once again, creativity inspires more creativity, like a series of mirrors.

I can’t say that I’m a painter, except that last month I helped paint the interior of a preschool. I used a roller and a 4-inch brush. I did exactly as I was told, with very little creativity.

Sometimes I will try hard to do a craft. Again, I follow directions and try to copy the example. The results are routinely unremarkable.

I am more adventurous with music and dance and often improvise. I love the freedom of expression I’ve gained after decades of practice and years of aging to the point of no longer trying to impress. Maybe that’s something the very young, the very old, and the very confident can get away with.

Once upon a time, I gave dinner parties. I’ve never been a good cook, but I can follow a recipe. What I really enjoyed as a creative exercise was setting the stage!

My daughter Susan is a very good artist. She took me to an open studio bar once for a Mother’s Day gift. We had a blast, and I got to keep all the art.

At a healthy, creative restaurant and store in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I came across this re-purposed cigarette vending machine that was selling original artwork the size of a pack of cigarettes. I’d never seen anything like it before or since.

No one creates in a vacuum. We are all influenced, we all use shared resources. We are co-creators or collaborators, really. I’m most proud of the contribution I made to creating four wonderful human beings. They are all stunning, vibrant, living works of art. I’m proud of the work I do each day to try to create meaning. I’ve scrapped much of that work, but I keep at it. The exhibit that is my Life is a work in progress. I’m grateful for the opportunity to engage in the process that Einstein called “intelligence having fun”.

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Lens-Artist Photo Challenge: There is a crack in everything

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“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in” – Leonard Cohen, Anthem

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.” – Italian proverb

“We asked for signs
The signs were sent
The birth betrayed
The marriage spent
Yeah, and the widowhood
Of every government
Signs for all to see

I can’t run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up
A thundercloud
They’re going to hear from me” – Anthem, cont’d

My country is suffering and divided. There is a crack, deep and wide, in our governing system. So many people have forgotten the good that was intended by the democracy we tried to create. It is terrifying to contemplate a future with an aspiring dictator. I’m hoping that our vote next week is a bell that can still ring for justice, for freedom, for government of the people, by the people, for the people.

There is a Japanese art called “kintsugi” where broken pottery is mended with gold, filling the cracks, drawing the pieces back together. Its spiritual significance is that if we choose to embrace our struggles and repair ourselves with the precious metal of love, we can become more beautiful for having been broken. My friend uses this idea in her garden, where she mends broken glass with small, colorful chips. Her garden is a riot of colors – dahlias, vegetables, and ornaments. Many of her decorations have become cracked and worn over time, left to the elements.

I spent this last week at my friend’s house, caring for her dog Bodhi, while she traveled.

Bodhi is an older rescue dog. She has only one eye, with a cataract. She doesn’t hear very well, and she is currently battling bladder stones. She becomes very anxious when she is left alone. Even with these imperfections, she is a sweet presence of love, always wanting to be beside me, stretched out in the sunlight on the warm carpet, and even more thrilled when she is allowed to jump onto the bed with me.

All week long, I have been thinking of the lyrics of Cohen’s Anthem. I have been thinking of “The Gifts of Imperfection” (a book by Brené Brown); I have been pondering the state of the Union. I have been willfully ringing the bells that still sound in my community: justice, equity, transformation, pluralism, interdependence, and generosity. And I have been trying to pour Love into every crack, every heart, every word, every action I engage with. I do this with faith that the Light will pour in.

May it be so!
Thank you, Ritva, for this beautiful inspiration!

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Cool Colors

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“The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is the love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless.” – Maggie Nelson

John’s challenge to us this week is to depict cool colors. He says, “Cool colors evoke calmness, serenity, and tranquility, feelings often associated with water, sky, and nature.” From green to violet, the short wave colors reflect a part of the spectrum found in abundance on our blue planet. As the northern hemisphere turns away from the sun, days are growing shorter, nights are growing colder, and the change in light brings a mellow calm to the excitement of summer. I wish you well, Friends, as this season comes to an end!

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Perfect Pairs

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My driveway, good for gathering blackberries or snowballs

Elizabeth of Albatz Travel Adventures hosts the Challenge this week with a tutorial on creating photographic diptychs. I’ve been playing around with the WordPress image gallery options, and this makes me think of pairing up mis-matched socks or table place settings. Do you wear imperfectly mated socks? Do you put differently colored dishes together? Do you match up contrasting fabrics and textures and patterns to create an ensemble (or a room) that is balanced and pleasing? I am in awe of people with that kind of design sense. This is a fun way to play along! I will close with one of my very favorite pairings…

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Two Rectangles

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This week’s challenge offers a photography technique about composition. Edigio of Through Brazilian Eyes illustrates how two dominant rectangular areas in a photo create a balanced and pleasing image. I thought the example below seemed to offer a good example.

The porch pictured above belonged to a historic building on the William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge not far from my home. Unfortunately, it burned to the ground last December. Here’s a news photo I found of it in flames.

(Photo by Damien Miller/USFWS)

When I first read of this composition technique, I was reminded of an annual event that I visited in the Milwaukee Art Museum. It was called “Art in Bloom” and featured a contest of flower arrangements inspired by the artwork on exhibit. I tried to photograph the original art and the flower arrangement in a way that would showcase the similarities. Lo and behold, the two rectangles technique seemed to emerge!

In this case, more than two rectangles…

Thank you, Lens-Artists, for continually engaging our creative community. I wish you all the best – see you next week!

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Simple/Complex

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“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
― Confucius

“I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience — to appreciate the fact that life is complex.”
― M. Scott Peck

 “You’ve got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you’ve got.” ― Toni Morrison

Congratulations to Sofia, our host this week, for choosing a challenge that is truly inspiring and rich. The challenge is about Minimalism and Maximalism, and in Art, this spectrum can reflect a tension not only in mood and atmosphere, but in history and philosophy as well. Sofia notes, “The Baroque period is probably one of the best examples of excessive decoration and a sense of awe. Money and power were demonstrated by increasingly outrageous works of art…”

Where are your tastes and sympathies right now? Does your brain and body long for the peaceful simplicity of minimal overload and distraction? Or are you celebrating the elaborate interconnectedness and biodiversity of all that we call Life?

I have to admit that I swing back and forth constantly. And maybe that is what evolved human brains do best. Using our abilities to change perspective, focusing in and zooming out with ease, allows us to gather information and make decisions like no other animal on Earth. We inhabit a variety of experiences and notice the differences, and then we get the opportunity to choose how to approach our next interaction. I don’t think there is a “correct” choice, but there is much to be learned about the benefits or tragedies resulting from how we’ve chosen to look at the world. I definitely rely on the opportunity to change my vision when I feel that it is not serving me or others.

I look forward to seeing how other Lens-Artists have interpreted this excellent challenge!

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Seen Better Days

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“Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.” ― Robert Browning

Last week’s Photo Challenge was all about Autumn color, the beautiful garb of aging, death and decay. How appropriate that Tina chooses for this week’s challenge the idea of how dilapidated, vintage, older things that have “seen better days” capture the photographer’s eye as things of loveliness and interest.

“The love of old things is a way of respecting time.”
― Wu Ming-Yi

 “Of all the footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditation, that on death is supreme.” 
― Gautama Buddha

The more I study the beauty of aging and death, the more I am drawn into the transformation of cells and matter. Consider that Life is marked by change, that change is the continuation of Life in new forms. Below is a photo of a petrified tree stump in the Flourissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado, illustrating the change from vegetable into mineral.

Is it any wonder we photographers are fascinated by the visual evidence of the dance of Life and Time? As humans, we are definitely a part of this process. As humans, we take our experience and create Art to celebrate it.

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Reflections

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“Use reflective surfaces to create an artistic echo of a scene…” 

Mirror, mirror on the wall…why is it I blog at all?
I started this blog when I began my 50th year of life. That was in August of 2011. I had just moved to Wisconsin to live with Steve. I was widowed three and a half years. I had a lot to process and a lot to learn.

I am now facing another transition: leaving Wisconsin and Steve to live in Oregon, closer to three of my four adult children, my  mother, and my three siblings. I have a lot to process and a lot to learn.

I learn by reflecting on what I’ve seen.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

I am making this cross-country move because I have learned again what I always knew to be my Truth: that I belong most importantly in my Family – my family of origin and the family that my late husband and I loved into being. 

 

“Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.”
― Jean-Luc Godard

Writing in this blog, storing photographs and memories, was a way to plant the seeds of realization. In my words and pictures, I remind myself who I truly am and see who I am becoming.

“There is one art of which man should be master, the art of reflection.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All my artistic echoes have origins in my mother and repercussions in my children. Being so distant from their heartbeats just doesn’t make sense. I need to hear the rhythm of our art, our lives, in order to keep dancing. 

“What we do now echoes in eternity.”
― Marcus Aurelius


May the love we create in our family be reflected in the world. I believe we all have the responsibility and the capability to make this a more loving, peaceful, beautiful place.

Thank you, Miriam, for hosting this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge.  

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Creativity

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I think Creativity inspires more creativity. Case in point: Ann-Christine has used her creative inventiveness to come up with a photo challenge, and now my creative energy imagines a new response.

And to illustrate my point further, I’d like to introduce you to ART in BLOOM – the Milwaukee Art Museum’s “stunning art-inspired floral installations” that are exhibited each spring. This exhibit is also a contest. The idea is to create a floral interpretation of one of the paintings in the museum’s galleries. This is the Grand Prize winner:

And here is my own gallery of my personal favorites: 

And to take the idea one step further, here is creative inspiration to the fourth degree: a photograph of a photographer inspired by a floral design inspired by a painting.

Creativity is communal and connective this way. We inspire each other, we learn from each other, we appreciate beauty together – differently.

Thank you, my fellow Lens-Artists, for inspiring me each week and inviting me to play along. What a great opportunity to live out Einstein’s words: “Creativity is intelligence having fun!”