Visual Reflections: Nature Photography in the Age of Uncertainty – No. 47 (Meadow Photomontage Series)

25 June 2018

Lens:

Taken in Camera+ and edited in Snapseed and Pixlr.

Meadow Photomontage; All Rights Reserved 2018 Sally W. Donatello

Click onto image to enlarge. Let me know your response to this photomontage. Prints are available upon request.

Pens:

Often it’s a challenge to express what my feelings are as I discover spring’s gifts. The visual language has as much emotions as the written. But the confluence of the two takes hard, hard work to combine.

But Mother Nature is a precious muse, and allows me to experiment. She inspires and gives hope in a world that has become fragile and more and more anxiety-producing. And so I was pondering (in my need to immerse myself in nature) a meaningful image that conjures a sense of nature’s omnipresence as a meadow of summer flowers.

To imagine is worthy, but to create the imagined is to bring an inner peace most gentle and nourishing and nurturing. While it does not replicate the real, it forges a path toward it.

The landscape continues to rejuvenate and flowers are not in full flourish. So creating an imaginary meadow is an experiment with a sizable challenge.

My intention in the Lens section was to create a meadow of spring/summer flowers. But that did not occur. Instead the photomontage is a white coneflower bursting from a meadow of ferns. The coneflower is from my garden, and the ferns are from a recent trip to Longwood Gardens. The result is an abstraction of nature’s bounty.

The verdant image is my tribute of the landscape and its movement from winter’s nondescript color field to the delicacies of spring and summer. The imagined has its powerful place in memory and the future. And it leaves a larger challenge for me to fulfill the convergence of floral beauties over time. 

Note:

For those you who are enamored with the master architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), take a few minutes to view this article that allows you to explore (as you sit at your computer) one of his most famous architectural sites.

On the website Quartzy (“You Can Now Explore Frank Lloyd Wright Incredible Architecture Lab From Your Computer,” 21 June 2018 by Anne Quito) the images focus on Taliesin West, Wright’s tribute to the landscape of the Arizona desert, which takes you into the realm of magical virtual reality. Taliesin is where his philosophy of organic architecture and experiments were realized. He lived and worked there from 1937 to 1959. I was astonished at the latest project to document his work: a 3-D imagining laser project. Digital innovation was used to scan every aspect of Taliesin West, which is a monument to his genius. It astonishes.

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