Salidasmith

  Passion is infused into art along two paths.   It is no different than in life.   There is the gentle persuasion of material and the easing together of elements.   Creating relationships with kindness, persuasion, solicitation of sensitivities.   There are also the techniques of power,   where the large muscles of the mind and body move material, embrace an idea in an intense lock that can only be released through some mutual consummation experienced between the artist and the work.   The gentle approach and the powerful approach.   They are equally important.   These two aspects of interaction are exactly yin and yang.   They should not be confused with male and female.   They are the tools of an artist who is an animal capable of imagination and creativity.   Miyamoto Musashi (circa 1600, Japan) might have said, “You must study this and understand it to achieve your potential.”     All el...

  I walked under blue skies and through a skiff of snow today.   The trail up S Mountain didn’t offer anything to my camera that was structurally interesting.   A few lazy shots of lichen or a frost pattern, but nothing which grabbed at me.   Later, examining images taken over the holiday, I found little inspiring, yet could not escape the feeling that the landscape, the brisk air, leaves drying and partially covered by snow, and the brilliant Colorado sky had filled me with pleasure that should find some expression.   I began experimenting with an image of tree stump      among a few leaves.   The roots had character.   There were suggestions of color.   As I turned the image, applying different filters, then reblending the layers, I saw what had been hidden.   It was the colors … the colors of fall slowly disappearing as winter became ascendant.  

Today I added a new collection to the my website . The lead image, in a grouping titled "evolve," is shown here and centers around a tree and a luminous field.   The tree itself was photographed in the San Luis Valley of south central Colorado.   It is neither an exceptional tree or a remarkable photograph.     But I repeatedly return to this image as a base for other ideas.   The first time I used it was in a clumsy mystification of a beautiful flight of wood steps in Pindaya, Burma.  While the resulting image was not a success, I began to recognize in that tree something of myself.  And it became an artifact for creative conversation about myself and my relationship with the changing world. I'm sure other image makers experience a similar recurring attraction to a thematic image. You can see this image used again in other efforts; although it's original structure seems to change, the centrality of the im...

  I’m celebrating the release of my fifth fiction book, titled Uncivil .   It’s available on Amazon as a paperback or kindle edition.   As an author of absolutely no renown, I think this story deserves some promotion beyond allowing it to sit quietly behind the ranks of a quarter million other books all of which seem to have been written by someone with the last name, Smith.     The story is set almost 400 years in the future on a very changed North American landscape.   And while I may be pessimistic about our future in the face of a warming climate and degrading ecosystems, Uncivil is not a dystopian diatribe.   The story line follows two principal characters: a hunter-forager surface-dwelling survivalist named Hodé and Anya, an anthropologist who belongs to the “Makers”, a technological subterranean population whose cities and universities are scattered across the continent, all underground.   It’s an entertaining adventure ...

 In the age of digital arts, everyone has access to imagery, tools, editors.  We can all express ourselves and thereby enter the vast domain of "anonymous accomplishment".   In the age of Covid-19, communicating and sharing these accomplishments feels more important.  The local artists' group has ceased meeting, the old codgers who talk politics are at home sanding a new coffee table, photographers are looking for someone to come outside and strike a memorable pose along the river - and no one comes, the quilter needs an audience as well as cold weather,  ...  so much has moved online as we try to talk to one another. And here I am, too. I am a Smith.  My surname, with which I have grown comfortable, pretty much assures you will never find this blog.  But if you are by chance reading this, we are all smiths.  A smith is a craftsman; a capable person whose observations of the world and transformations of ideas into hardened reality reveal skil...