Linda Clark-Borre
Beauty, Shock & Awe: Life's Triple Threat
01/27/2012 13:42Part of our business is in Mendocino County, California, where the biggest distraction from the work at hand is the scenery. I am used to being awed by great paintings, architecture, and the admirable output of anybody’s hands, mind, or heart. But this nature stuff is starting to really get me.
Sorry, God, I guess I hadn’t really been paying attention before.
The Mendocino and Lake County landscape began to have its way with me from my very first trip, when I snapped a photograph of Clear Lake and sent it to my longtime buddy Mark – a great man and photographer--on December 11, 2011. As he was formally studying photography, I was trying to impress him with a few unschooled efforts. When Mark saw it, he emailed back that I was becoming a great photographer-artist. I replied that I was no artist of any kind, and ha ha, it was only a humble Smartphone photo. He wrote a terse one liner in response to that: “An artist is someone who sees what others do not.”
Mark was killed in an accident not 24 hours later.
The places I go through now speak volumes. I am forever haunted, but I don’t mind. The landscape has become another character that plays itself before my astonished eyes. I still take photos, with no more aim to improve. I let luck, karma, the mystery, whatever surprise me and often it does.
That’s all there is to say. Here are some photos of yesterday’s travels. Again, I aim the phone in the general direction of that which beckons, and hope for the best. In so doing, I try not to fall over the edge of anything.
The first image is the one described above: the first encounter with the ethereal water, and color the likes of which I'd not seen before with my poor partially color-blind eyes. The last merely represents my attempt to get back down to earth; were I to fail to appreciate such simple, rural beauties as these, I just might get lost in the mist and the mystery of that which I do not yet really know at all, despite my frequent visitations.
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