step

Here's a picture. Click for full size. Isn't it awesome? I would like to know what you think, maybe I'm just too enamored with my own ideas. Its just that this picture has so much detail, it has clear shapes and lines, it has life and motion but no faces or personalities to overpower the plain ordinariness of it. Best is that this photograph was an accident! I had been snapping away at an eagle and just waved the camera at this cat and triggered the shutter. I totally missed the cat, I wasn't even looking the viewfinder. There is nothing of 'artists intention' in this shot, no skill of mine. My intention had been to lazily snap a cat portrait, and if I had been successful, the result would be average and forgettable. I have lots of cat portraits I never look at they're so boring.

But I wonder if my enjoyment is also accidental. Does anyone else like this picture, or it is good for me because I know what lies outside the picture: My parent's farm. And I know where the cement came from, why it has white stuff stuck to it, what the cat looks like, the source of the clod of asphalt and the straw. Is the eye appeal in those specifics and what they symbolize, or is it in the image itself; the hint of cat, the geometry of beveled and stained cement, decaying straw mixed with gravel?

Only you can say. I don't know. There are many things I don't know, and as such lack makes itself aware, I must address it somehow. How does one live with unfinished, incomplete, unproven concepts? Sometimes we use worry. Sometimes we ignore it. Or let anxiety destroy our abilities. I don't know how to approach the unknown. But I'm going to try to be calm about it. - yet I can't imagine how it must be to not have God to trust in. Must be horrific.


Grady Houger ~ It will be very interesting to see how long it takes to get tired of looking at this picture.