poem

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed---and gazed---but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. -William Wordsworth

Texture

I was driving back to Pullman the other day when I took this out the car window. The texture is especially amazing - the odd feathery bit near the middle remind me of pheasant feathers or maybe scales.

Bo-bomb!

I was driving home to Seattle this weekend when I happened to espy this while refilling my gas in Othello.

Dangerous-looking cloud, eh? I wonder what would make it go all mushroom-shaped like that. Hmm...is that in the direction of Hanford?

On Clouds

I have been obsessed with them for some time now - my friends used to laugh at me for spending so much time staring up at the massive, weightless things. "Oh look, there's a good one!" I would say and they would barely glance at one that looked like every other cloud to them. To me, it always set my imagination on fire. I wished I could paint so I could represent the beauty of the things, or to write with the eloquence to describe it.

Now that I've learned to paint, and more or less to write, I find little greater joy than to make clouds. If I need to warm up, I make them; if I need to cool down I make more. My final project in 102 this past fall was this:

A self-portrait of me doing the thing I've done the most - cloudgazing.

It was almost life-size, and the various paintings have now dissipated, much like real clouds. One I gave to my sister. Another lives in my living room; another was painted over and reincarnated as something else.

The most beautiful thing about clouds is that things as big and glorious as ancient battleships, or cathedrals, or monuments, can change in an instant. They are not bound to anything - neither the rules of constancy nor to gravity. They are freedom.

Inception

K. The first thing to say is WOW. I get why people have been saying that Inception is this decade's The Matrix; not only because of the special effects, which are stunning, but because of the reality-questioning nature of it.

Reality is an uncanny thing. We live in it; we have no control over it; it is utterly intangible; the way we see it affects everything we do. Everyone is familiar with that moment of half-waking where we are caught between dream and waking, where we are no longer sure of what is real and what is only in our head; or that half-recalled memory that we may have simply dreamed.

Because of this, the totems used in Inception hold particular importance. They are meant to be a thing that is unique to the dreamer - that only the dreamer knows the true weight, proportions, and attributes of. They are a small piece of tangibility in the intangible, a thing that can be touched that represents reality, which can't. Isn't this part of the idea of sculpture? To render, in three dimensions, a thing that is abstract or unable to be seen in its entirety? Of course, it's not the only purpose of sculpture, but it is one that sets it apart from two-dimensional art forms.