OK, six hours in the car by myself today gave me entirely too much time to ponder questions like this, which isn't a bad thing, but for some reason I feel the need to follow that up with something a bit more concrete.  My latest uploads from Jordan should do the trick – they include more photos from Petra as well as a new group of photos from an abandoned glass factory, which had so much gorgeous texture I could hardly see straight.

Photos like these inspire my collage work, and they are certainly influencing my next round of work.  With this next series, I am wanting to capture the many layers that exist in any given story, perspective or concept, and it is fun experimenting with ideas for that.  I suppose this has been true for all of my work – this desire to express all the layers that exist in the world and in life – but this time around I am trying to convey a broader kind of expression.  I want there to be even more mystery, and oddly enough I feel like the best way to do that is with a simpler style.

I love imperfection, decay, messy, scribbled, torn, cracked.  I love all the nooks, crannies and corners that look like hiding places for things like treasure maps, old letters and sepia photographs with curled edges.

I am working with washed out blues, turquoise and pale, Coke-bottle greens.  I am working with gold, graphite, and micro point pens.

So tomorrow, it's back to work in the studio.

"The creative process is a process of surrender, not control."  ~Julia Cameron

* In yoga, certain poses that focus on a specific area of the body require a counter-pose to balance things out.  For example, the bridge pose – or back bend – opens the chest, and is usually followed by a pose that brings the knees towards the chest; the knees to chest is the counter-pose to the back bend, creating balance in the routine and in the body.  I felt the need to write a post about something a bit more earth-bound following my earlier post about the meaning of life – a counter-pose, if you will, to balance things out.