Daffodil

Daffodil

Picture Book Jacket Collage

24"x30"

It is a funny time to work on an early spring flower collage when it is over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  The AC is running and to go outside means you are going to sweat.  Despite obvious signs of heat, I felt drawn to a picture I had taken years ago while living in Seattle.  

If I remember correctly, this Daffodil popped out of the ground in front of our brick house just steps from the front door.  With my digital camera in hand, I wanted to mark the changes occurring and capture something beautiful.  I am drawn to beauty, as most everyone else is, and I have for the longest time tried to understand what makes something "beautiful".  This ongoing search (to this day) baffles me and surprises me and continues to lead me to bigger and deeper questions.  

This search for Beauty has led me through poetry, through artwork, through music, through the sound of my children's voices, through the luminescent quality of my wife's eyes, and through acts of kindness directed from one human to another.  It has led me to notice the small things, the insignificant daily occurrences that once noticed become the most impactful part of the day.    

This daffodil became that mark of beauty, and has held quietly across various digital formats and devices, to finally jump out and receive the attention it deserves.   I am not writing this in a way that points to what I have made or the skill involved to reproduce this picture.  I am writing this so that you may find that moment of beauty long stashed away that may just resurface given the opportunity.  

A quick note back to poetry, I often return back to this one, an absolute favorite:

A Study of Beauty

by Patrick Rosal

To  have   rejected  strategy;  to sit,  instead,  with  one’s  bafflement;   to   see   such
bafflement as a preface to madness — and awe; to touch some simplicity,  to attend
to  that  simplicity;  to  relentlessly  pursue  its  continuity  with  the  infinite; to catch  
the occasional  glimpse  &  be  changed.  Not sparkling  embellishments  or  pristine
blades.  Not  the  effete  disguised in denim.  Not  the  FOR SALE  sign  hanging from
the Gallery of Misery.  Not  the policies of lawncare, but  the bulbous deformation of
one green  gourd borne on a dying vine.  Not  the  gloss of  museum marble,  but the
young  man weeping under the vaulted  cobwebs. Not deputies of  the spreadsheet,
but  a road disappeared  under new  snow.  Not  scripted tours or  curated  wonders,
but  the crack  that  runs  the  length  of  the  last  drinking  glass  in the cabinet.  Not
surveillance,  but  surrender.  Not  worship,  but devotion.  Blessing  and  blasphemy, 
both.  Not the sanitized  tables of slaughter,  but  the fleck of  tendon  that  pops  the 
butcher in the eye.