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| Rebecca & Hydrangea macrophylla 'Ayesha' - Fuji X-3 Photograph 15 August 2024 |
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| Rosemary & Rosa 'Bathsheba' 15 August 2024 |
After the almost four years since Rosemary died it is evident to me that she was the mater-familias and kept our family together. That feeling of unity is pretty well disappearing. I can add to that, the 20th century concept of a grandmother or grandfather has changed. I am simply an old man to my granddaughters.
It is difficult for me to conceive of this as it was my grandmother who gave me a lot of my education and saved me from whippings from my parents because she said I was an artist and they had to be more understanding.
One of my granddaughters is 22 and the other is going to be 27 this Saturday. I wonder if they will ever see in me what they saw when they were little girls. I am a believer in statistics so I think I will be gone by the time they realize that the old man is also their grandfather.
Every day, when I get up in the morning to feed Niño and Niña, as I begin to go down the stairs, I am faced by this portrait I took of Rebecca when she might have been 7 or 8. I remember that my eldest daughter Alexandra did her makeup. Light from the white wall that was then Eaton’s reflected into my studio. Arthur Erickson called that light in my studio, God’s Light. I decided to dispense with my lighting equipment.
I have often written that my eldest daughter tends to have a melancholic look on her face. She might have inherited some of it from Rosemary who was serious lots of the time.
I am wondering if Rebecca did not inherit that sad look from Rosemary via her mother Hilary (she is a smiler).
It was Rebecca’s other grandfather who often asked me why I did not ask Rebecca or Lauren to smile when I took their portraits.
While most will think what I will write here is bunk, I believe that eye contact, serious eye contact with the camera, precisely at the level of my subject’s eyes, will result in a portrait that somehow peers into the person’s soul. Does a smile hide it? I believe it does.
By now many must understand that I use my scanner not only to scan my negatives and slides but also to scan my plants. They might also see that I combine plants with photographs on the scanner or framed photographs with plants. Simply put I use my scanner as a table-top camera.
Today I discovered something new for me. It all started when I scanned several lovely yellow (almost orange) Rosa ‘Bathsheba’ blooms. I could not throw them away so I cut their stems and placed them on a nice ceramic tray with water. I call them floaters and I usually place the floaters on my dining room table.
I figured I could do something else. The result is in this blog, as is, the one where I combine Rebecca’s sad portrait with my Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Ayesha’.
From afar I hope Rebecca has a nice birthday and I also hope she succeeds on all her dreams.
I hope that she may one day knock on my door, and when I open, it she will say, “¿Papi como estás?”
