Winter Has Been Here Too Long |
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Catherine is the real thing. p.s., March 15, 2010
Passages Years can slip by nearly invisibly, at times with little, it seems, to account for. At least, it can be hard to remember at the end of them what one has actually accomplished. Not so with this past annum as Quadrants, if nothing else, has become a charting of influences, ideas, visions, resonances, tweakings, stirrings and other halloos from our individual and collaborative brains. While I perhaps spurred Paul onto greater productivity and into taking certain risks, such as he did throughout the composition of our novella of absurdity, The Door, he enabled me to compose a wide range of pieces in different styles, encouraged by his own visual diversity and occasional penchant for the unexpected. This collaboration has been the smoothest one I've ever engaged in, unmarked by one serious quibble, as if our psyches were perfectly content to zing off each others', unconcerned with scoring points in who did what or when. Although we each stuck mostly to our primary mediums, we also allowed each other to experiment. I took photos; Paul wrote. And in this openness, this artistic generosity, we made discoveries, erased or enlarged boundaries. In the process, formed a friendship that transcends age, gender, discipline and eventually even geography, placing the act of creating as paramount. Fun? Yeah, it was that too. C.O., March 15, 2010
The Beginning of the End Hard to believe that this experiment is coming to a conclusion of sorts. Catherine Owen and I started this website on a whim — something about a vision at 4 a.m., if I recall. It proved fruitful. Catherine is possibly Western Canada's most prolific poet and I have often had to scramble to keep up with her word processor. Photography is more of a fits-and-spurts affair, coming out in gobs punctuated by periods of relative inactivity. Still, in most areas of our collaboration we were able to find common ground and, for me, having the site in the back of my mind sometimes got me to look at things I might have otherwise ignored. P.S. late February, 2010
Shifts beyond Solstice As we enter this final quadrant of our year-long collaboration, one that has been absurdly productive and fascinating, on the cusp of 2010's new light, I have recently moved back to Vancouver. The decision was abrupt, unwilled for the most part and rather brutal. Thus, the transition is proving somewhat difficult, despite feeling more “natural” here, in the former rain forest that I was born and raised in, mild, damp, breathable. Though the winter is much crueller in Edmonton, I find myself missing the sunlight, the luminous and huge skies, the magpies, my walks across the frozen North Sask river. Now I am a dual exile, at home again yet longing, as humans do for the ineffable, for the place I once thought of as penance, having, in the 3.5 years I lived there, begun to consider it familiar, a source, nexus of love. How Paul and I will now interpret this final season from our increasingly disparate vantage points intrigues me. Where will this conversation of outer and inner weathers lead us?
Seed of November With the passing of Hallowe'en we enter the transition season of November, where the daylight becomes cold and our senses, perhaps in counterbalance, seem heightened in their awareness of the seasons and the passage of time.
The seasons here are most definitely not quadrantial, the precise slicings I was used to in my childhood on BC's coast where there actually used to be snowy winters followed pretty much three months later by piquant spring days and thence by an alternately toasty & drizzly summer and an autumn, mellow and gradual in its shift into cold. In Edmonton, conversely, the largest mouthful of this mathematically-skewed pie is full of snow, with a sliver on either side of it blossom and mulch and a slightly larger serving of dry scalding summer wedged between them.
Labour Day, 2009 And so the summer dies and we head towards the third quadrant in this experiment in collaboration. It has been interesting so far. The site is an electronic ideas notebook where we present material in call-and-response. Summer has been easy. There have been lots of intersections. Now the darkness starts closing in. We will have to see where these things go. p.s. September 7
New material… Discarded things, by Catherine here. Sonnets for a Windy Day by Paul and Catherine here. Joint venture: Jeanette Applebelle & Ray “shutterbug” Luvah here. Photos by Karen Moe We are pleased to present work by West Coast Artist Karen Moe. If you missed it up front you can see it here.
Photos by Owen Reports from the Hammock: New photos posted by Catherine Owen. They're here.
Influences Like most thinking photographers, I owe a debt to Duane Michals. Years ago, I remember looking at some of his sequences in utter surprise that photography could be used in this way. It left a permanent impression. I don't mean to copy him too closely, of course, but it's a fine way to make a point.
The Perils of Being An Aesthetic Fiend The other night, I was invited to dinner at a fellow poet's house. Everything she
Moon Shadows I had a terrible dream that civilization was crumbling. Some kind of virus was making people mad. Children were infected. They became violent. It was one of those dreams that take a while to come out of, even though you are officially awake. The morning looks drab as you realize that the glue that holds together thousands of years of history is really not very strong. If you look closely you can almost start to see through things and fear what is beyond them. The New York Times ran an article today on NASA photos showing moon shadows on the rings of Saturn, which, in an odd way, seemed relevant. At some level everything is connected. On writing Words and pictures are really not that far apart. Both involve a complex process of thought, expression and reaction. Good writing stands out, not because of what it tells you, but because of the things it suggests. It is the soundless resonance of text that lingers in the back of the brain long after the words have passed our eyes —like the matador of shadows, whom I almost see in my mind, but who vanishes at the last millisecond. Good words suggest encounters and they demand active participation. Pictures are a little more dangerous in that they invite apathy and passive viewing. You really have to push to get people’s full attention. In the end, however, it is all mostly pictures. Writing is really a camera without all the moving parts. The images that writing creates are liquid. They fill the molds offered by our imagination.
On photography I've owned a bunch of cameras over the years: a Pentax ME Super, a Canon, a Kodak, but The Creative Process You can Google up various experts who offer schemes to control creativity, but what these people really seem to be talking about is innovation in problem solving. Brainstorming. That kind of thing. Creativity, itself, is more elusive. It is very difficult to control and predict. It is subject to the vagueness of self-awareness, mood, environment, immediate past experience, distant past experience, free will, cultural awareness, defiance, etc. It will work one day and abandon you the next. While creativity, itself, may be hard to nail down, you can encourage it by setting up the parameters under which it happens — the time of day, the location, the lens. You try to bring the right people to the right place with the right stuff and then you watch it unfold. Maybe it works. It is the uncertainty that makes it worthwhile. p.s., April, 2009
This isn't normally a site about technology but…I bought a rebuilt Panasonic Lumix LX2 camera this week. It's truly amazing what $200 can buy you: wide aspect ratio, RAW shooting capacity, a Leica lens, and up to 10 megapixels of resolution. And it's tiny. You can see some pictures here. It will open a new window, or tab in your browser. Paul Saturley, March 29, 2009 Quadrants is largely an experiment in creative process and web-based collaboration. The site was launched at the spring equinox, 2009 and will be constructed over a 12-month period. At the point of writing this. I am not entirely sure what will happen during those months. However, this is our point of departure. At times, the work may intersect. At times, it will be independent. We have agreed to invite guest contributors from time to time. The Quadrants logo represents stylized quotation marks — a reference to thoughts, to a particular mind set, whether expressed in words or pictures. Paul Saturley, March, 2009
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