Textures in Nature

Back in June when we were visiting Hawaii for our son’s wedding, we spent a delightful evening poking along Waikiki.  Our son thought I might be interested in a shop there selling photographs by Peter Lik.  Mr Lik’s landscapes are stunningly lovely and the shop displays them beautifully.  But the ones that captured my interest were shots of textures presented in a square format.  There was a poster on the wall with the photographs presented in rows, clearly meant for choosing which ones you wanted blown up and framed.  I asked if I could buy the poster; the answer was ,”No”.  But they would be happy to sell me the larger framed pieces of my choosing.

Since I really liked the variety of the photos and didn’t want large framed pieces, the next best thing was to spring for the pricey catalog.  They assured me that the quality of the real photographs was much better than those published in the amazingly lovely catalog but I was content with that.  And somewhere between the poster and my exit from the shop, I realized that I had taken many texture photographs myself.  I just needed to sort them out of all the photos I had taken and I could clearly have them printed collage style, almost like the ones by Mr Lik.  Mind you, I’m not claiming anywhere near the level of competency here, but my own photos come with memories of time and place, much nicer than just someone else’s image, no matter how fabulous.

So, for Christmas I asked my son to make the collages for me.  I sent him files, he sent me three lovely posters, two of my serious ones and one just for fun – with a cute little monkey face looking  out of one of the boxes. – 61 images in all.