I celebrated New Year’s Eve this year at Goli’s place. She lives in this beautiful house up on Sonoma Mountain, overlooking all of Santa Rosa and beyond. It’s a view that I’ve never seen during the daylight hours, and I may not get the chance. Goli’s apparently moving to Sebastopol!

Anyway, she had a kickass party right at the height of the flooding. In fact half the road leading up to her house washed out that night. But that didn’t stop like every hippie on this side of Sonoma County from showing up. In fact because of the weather, a group of performance artists (including Kandice Korves of Holistic Hooping) who had planned to put on a show in the city decided to stay and perform for us. I thought I took some killer pictures, considering I had no tripod and probably held a half-consumed bottle of champagne in one hand.

Yes, that’s a hula hoop. On fire.

I’ve put the rest up on flickr: New Year’s Eve Fire Dance. Enjoy.

On the way to lunch today, I noticed that the trees in the parking lot are starting to change color. The leaves on the ground had these incredible patterns, a thick band of red around the edges with cells of green and brown in the center, separated by thin veins of yellow. Each leaf was like a little work of art.

I thought back to a classmate who used to do fine art photography with a scanner. There’ve also been some posts on boingboing on the technique. On the way back from lunch I put a few leaves in my car to scan when I got home. Imagine my disappointment when I returned to a pile of brown, brittle leaves after a few hours in a warm car.

So there I was out in the parking lot picking leaves off the ground as people were heading to their cars. But I found some really nice ones—luckily they don’t seem to be in short supply.

As I recall, this classmate mentioned using a black, lightproof hood over her scanner to make the images, with flowers and other objects arranged on the scanner bed. I’ve got a tiny 4×6″ photo scanner, so I set a leaf down on the surface and held a black towel over the top while it scanned. And all I got was muddled grayness. Clearly this hobby is going to require some fancier equipment. Anyway, I pressed the top of the scanner down on the leaves and got much better images. Granted they have no depth of field, but given that I was scanning leaves, this wasn’t too much of a problem.

With only a little bit of editing, mostly to make the background uniformly black, I got what I think are two really interesting scans. Here’s my favorite, because of the dark brown cells inside the green.

And this one I liked because of the long stem and the almost symmetrical green cells.

I might look something like this:

Check out Ruby’s and Brian’s and Katie’s or make your own.

On the way home from the grocery store, picking up some fruit for the week, I had a thought that was half a wish and half a wonder.

Why hadn’t I delayed college to continue taking sculpture classes at the Elizabet Ney Art Museum? Just to see how much farther I could have gone. Several things precluded this from happening, most prominently the desire in me to strike out on my own. But then I wonder if the opportunity had offered itself, would that have altered the landscape? I know it was never really a tangible option, those classes were just a fun diversion, they made sense in the context of my focus on art in high school. And now, (though I realize it would have been highly improbable), given the chance to take a road less traveled, to focus on art and my eye and my technical skill in the absense of so many other distractions, I might have advised my younger self differently.

I don’t remember if my last class was that spring or the summer before I left for Chapel Hill, but I do remember that it was that summer I decided I would major in art because no other “lifestyle” would be more challenging. I also remember there was a moment when I realized my school schedule ruled out taking any classes at the Ney in the foreseeable future. I felt a kind of loss. I think my dad may have recommended bringing some wax to sculpt at school that I could cast during the summers. But I never came home during the summers. I took a few art classes, but I didn’t major in art. And I haven’t done any sculpting since.

Just before I left North Carolina for California I got an email from Enda O’Donoghue, an Irish artist based in Germany, asking whether he could use one of my photos as the basis for a painting. He acknowledged my public domain dedication, which was cool, but wanted to ask anyway, which was also cool. Of course I said yes, and we emailed back and forth a bit.

Turns out he’s done a series of paintings based on interesting photos he’s found on the web, usually with all the blips and blops that come with low resolution amateur shots. In fact he was disappointed my photos were so clear. Sorry. The photo he chose was one of a potluck dinner prepared by our residence area for Thanksgiving back when I was a senior in college (November 2001).

At one point he asked me whether the white blob was mayonnaise—and whether the “meal in question” had been any good. It struck me that maybe he didn’t realize this was a fairly typical Thanksgiving dinner, one of those cultural events unique to America. So I explained:

The white blob is Cool Whip (fat free whipped cream) on pumpkin pie. To the right of the pie is green bean casserole, beneath that in the lower right corner is what they call cornbread “dressing” in the South, but “stuffing” elsewhere, except it’s cooked outside of the turkey in a big lasagna pan. The yellow stuff in the lower left is a mystery to me. It looks like rice, possibly in a cheesy sauce possibly with some broccoli in it on the left. The red splotch in the top left is cranberry sauce/mold, and of course above that is a bread roll. I don’t believe that was my plate, so I’m not sure if it was good or not. I’m a fan of turkey and gravy, and green bean casserole mostly.

Sometime last week I got an email back with a photo attached saying the painting was complete! How cool is that?

Of course if you didn’t know it was a photo of a 35×23″ painting, you might think he’d just run my photo through a creative Photoshop filter. So now I’m mulling over whether to purchase the painting to hang over my dining table—after he exhibits it in Germany and Ireland.

I think it’s hella cool, but I wonder whether my future dinner guests would think so?