Myrtle Tree Arts Journal

I begin with pencil and paper. Simple. Meditative, airy gestures make marks and smudges . Alternating light and heavy pressure. My eyes try to study forms and shadow. Squinting and relaxing my gaze. Playing with seeing and not seeing.  Drawing involves continuous choosing, extracting and generalizing, while trying to dance across the paper. The inspirations are coming from walking in a very small fraction of the vast temperate rain forests on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington. I'm choosing to notice the stability of old growth spruce and cedar in Quinault, the twisted movement captured inside roots, bark, veins, and eroded paths along the Sol Duc. Man-made entanglements formed into artificial log jams fortify the banks of the Hoh. Artistic partner and spouse, Paul Godwin and I are on a trek, each day taking a bike ride into the bracing wind, and or a hike as light fog settles between the trees. We spend a night in a lodge next to a very still lake. My bathing suit fills with fin...

The present is just a moment in the continuous unfolding of perceptions and experiences. In meditative practice, I actively try to observe the arising and vanishing of the present to develop the skills to be in the present with deeper awareness. Similarly, the rapid passing of frames of video, the interweaving of streams of images and sounds, is for me, a way of observing an ephemeral present. "Right View" by Ameera Godwin   In this state of mind, I can start to experience a quality of "right view.": seeing what is true, and discerning how to respond, compassionately, ethically. I try to cultivate a relationship to temporality, "as an on-going purposeful effort to create one’s time and keep up one’s sensed continuity in time," as described by Estonian researcher, Kätlin Pulk . Working with digital video and using various non-narrative film approaches, my raw materials are the moving pixels with attributes like duration, speed, frequency, synchrony and as...