I appear to have reached my capacity for viewing art. I am going through museums of world class collections with a weary and disinterested eye. The antidote is the outdoors.
I am working through the "Day Hikes Around Los Angeles" guidebook. Yesterday I was at Temescal Canyon, just above Santa Monica, a sycamore and oak canyon with slopes of dense chaparral. Before embarking I was faintly nervous about mountain lions, which are becoming a menace around here. As it turns out, the only menace I faced was being run over by the trail runners, which conveniently served as protection against a lion attack. What kitty could resist chasing after a running prey?
The air was filled with the song of Wrentits, which filled me with nostalgia for when I first started birding in the early 80’s at Pt. Reyes Bird Observatory. They were one of my study species, and I sought out their nests in the dense brush and poison oak. This is also about the time when I started my "Stick Picture" series, and hiking in the California coastal scrub landscape made me realize how this particular landscape, and my immersion in it during a key interval in my life, is so primary in this body of work. I spend a lot of time in these kinds of places wherever I go because that’s where the birds are. Years of subsequent birding means I grew a big piece of my brain that can parse out the signal-to-noise ratio. That love of chaotic compexity, and the rewards of sussing out wrentits and skulky sparrows in the mess, have leaked over into my photography.
There’s a selection of photos from Temescal Canyon over on my Flickr site.
Hi, Doug,
Really like some of the 'stick pictures' in that flickr set... think a few of them would look especially good printed.
--JW
Posted by: Josh Wand | March 10, 2007 at 07:11 PM