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I love Autumn.  Cool days, chilly nights, and the freshest morning air of the year.  I like to go outdoors the first couple hours after dawn and take in the pure oxygen that was created overnight (before the rest of the world gets busy and dumps their junk into it). Deeply breathing-in the clean morning air not only feels healthful but also gives me a sense of connecting to nature as part of it. 



An especially lucky Autumn morning will be overcast. Clouds work, but fog is better.  With fog, dew drips from everything and distances fade into nothingness. This soft white backdrop that increases with distance focuses one's attention on only what's nearest, emphasizing close-by trees, their leaves, branches, any remaining fruit, and rendering any distant mountains into faint impressionistic suggestions.  Fog also seems to enhance the quiet of the morning as if the fog itself were a muffling compound, a sound-damping insulation packed between everything.  And colors seem deeper.  Dew wets the reds, oranges and yellows of autumn leaves into opaque dabs of painter's oils on the palette, while later daylight shines through the leaves and illuminates them into bold displays of fiery translucence.


I love nature, cool temperatures, earthy colors and I always favor spirit-calming stillness over a noisy environment.  So of course I love autumn most!  And mornings.  Bright clear daylight is too bold and loud for me:  a brash and busy competition for attention.  Morning is a whisper, a world of quiet where whatever speaks to you is profound for emerging from stillness.  Midday is like a busy Jackson Pollock painting; morning, the meaningful single stroke of a Japanese calligrapher's brush on blank paper.

Can I please live where every day is a soft autumn morning?  Cool temperatures, clouds and fog, even rain (which makes being indoors feel so homey. On a rainy day, bake something, drink cocoa, and light up the fireplace. Nothing is more comforting!).  And the smell of smoke in the air from other people's fireplaces adds to the romance, putting you in mind of so many sharing your delight of being warm indoors on a chilly day.

For variety, toss in a few summer days during the year, with up to about 85 degrees max.  And springtime.  That's good too.  Springtime, when winter's bare trees get tiny buds of green on their otherwise dark bare branches. That's one of my favorite sights of springtime: the hints of green on the dark 'bones' of a tree.  But that's another tale.

I took all these photos in my own backyard on the overcast, in fact foggy, autumn morning of November 26th, 2011.  When I was younger I would always move my camera back farther to capture more of a scene. But then a photography teacher told me, "You can't capture everything; instead, move in closer." Now, not only while taking photos but when just passing through the world, I'm not as fascinated by the big picture but by components of it:  shadows on an object, the chance perfect turn of a person's head, and the blaze of color of a single fiery autumn leaf remaining on a tree of brown. There are amazing effects of light, shadow, line, texture and color when you look close; and doing so enhances your appreciation of the world by noticing even the small stories.  In fact, if you look at the 'big picture' of my backyard you'd say, "What a mess!"  But these are samples of what I see there.  Enjoy your autumn. There's so much to love!

Art is a refuge. What does it help you to escape? Or if not escape, what does it help you to explore more deeply toward understanding? If not exploration, what does it help you to express?  Variously, art helps me escape, explore or express stress, mystery or obsessions.

Doing or viewing art helps me to escape the frustrating elements of life that I cannot change. Politics, economy, job, family, and so on. And when I say "viewing" art, I mean not only visual arts but also music (jazz records, live symphony concerts, rock on the radio), cartoons, movies, and so on.

Every person has feelings in their heart and mind that remain mysteries to them. Perhaps dreamlike fantasies or fascinations. Have you ever felt as though you belong in another time?  What would you see, hear or do if you lived in that time, and perhaps another place? Art can help you explore those feelings, perhaps eventually understand your own motivations that drive you toward that fantasy and make yourself feel more whole. Or perhaps love has eluded you, and you turn to art to explore the mystery of why it has and to clarify for you exactly what it is you're looking for.  Myself, I feel as though I belong to the era a generation or two before me (and whether or not I *want* to live there is still another question; that time only feels familiar and comfortable to me for some unknown reason).  

Perhaps an obsession is a deeper mystery to be explored, and once understood and accepted, then may actually be enjoyed. Whether the obsession becomes an entertainment or continues to be a confusion, there is an urge to express it. Art is a way to do so. We create stories, poems or visuals on the subject of our obsession to express the fascination. We want to share it with the world, either as a glorification or as a call to another who shares a similar continuing confusion that "you're not alone" and, perhaps together, we can defuse the confusion of our obsession and learn to accept it simply as an entertaining fascination.

In all of these things - escape, exploration and expression - art is a refuge. It comforts us with a place to hide, it eases our mind with understanding and through being a communal gathering place around shared experiences it helps us not to feel alone.

On DeviantArt, we all may not consider ourselves "artists."  But we do all have our own variety of stresses, mysteries and obsessions that we feel a need to escape, explore and express. By sharing them here as "art" we might find understanding of ourselves and we do find understanding and appreciation of one another's individuality. And appreciation of others' individuality reduces the negative connotation of one another's differences as "deviant."  So how wonderful that we all gather here and enjoy each other's "DeviantArt."

After years of being a member here, I've finally begun adding some of my photos to DeviantArt.  I do have my website (still deciding if I want to list it here), but it's nice to "audition" images here and see what response each receives.  Also, to create images for here has the added benefit of inspiring me actually TO create new images (whereas I am often lazy about doing so, otherwise). Onward...

I have my website devoted to my photography, and that's fine for now. I will likely post some of my photos here, but only after I establish a different account here in the same name as my website.  And when I create that new account, I'll add a link to my website. But for now, THIS old account will just enable me to comment on people's images & all the other "members only" activity.  I'll close this acct when I establish the new one.

How do I get my DeviantID photo into my "Devious Information" section??