I will be returning to the UK in search of more “Portals of Stone” – Arrive @Glasgow Weds 10/8. Send destination suggestions to [email protected] . I’ll be the guy with the camera…
Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be getting on a plane and returning to the (still) United Kingdom in search of more “Portals of Stone.”
But for pure landscape drama, you can’t beat Norway. Go head and spend five minutes looking at this:
I spent about two hours in a bank this morning.
I can’t remember the last time I spent two hours in a bank. Probably…. never. I mean, who spends two hours in a bank? You go in, your make your deposit / cash your check (which you probably did at the drive-up window or ATM – without ever actually going in the bank) and you leave. 5 minutes, tops, right?
On this occasion, I had good reason to be in the bank – the Planters Bank in Clarksville, TN – for two hours. I was hanging an installation of photos on a wall which the bank has graciously dedicated as an art gallery. One of the officers of the bank saw the very first “Portals of Stone” installation at the Franklin Jazz Fest back in September last year, and invited me to exhibit some of my work when there was an opening, which turned out to be this month.
So this morning I went up to Clarksville with a trunk full of framed and mounted photos, and hung then on the wall. The whole undertaking took about two hours:
“Portals of Stone” and other work at the Planters Bank in Clarsville
That gave me more than enough time to observe – albeit peripherally – what all takes place at a “bricks and mortar” bank during business hours.
Which is to say, not much.
In the two hours that I was in the bank, I’d say fewer than a dozen patrons came in to conduct any business. The rest of the time, the several tellers and a manager passed the time kibbitzing with each other. There was considerable discussion about who would leave when during the day tomorrow to vote in the state and local primary elections.
There was one person who was at her desk and on the phone almost the entire time I was there. I overheard most of her conversation while I was hanging pictures.
The side of the conversation that I overheard consisted entirely of snippets like “click there” and “open that” and “close that.”
In otherwords, as near as I could tell, the busiest person at the bank was the one who was telling whoever was on the phone how to work the bank’s website.
I guess the good news is: at least it’s not a phone bank in Bangalore…
Follow this link to get “Beauly Starscape” for your computer desktop.
Regular visitors to this site will recognize Beauly Priory as the place where, in a real sense, this whole “Portals of Stone” business got started.
Beauly Priory – a small abbey ruin on the Black Isle near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands
It has been almost a year since I’ve created a new “Portals” piece. For much of that time, I’ve been scanning my photo libraries looking for suitable candidates for the “Portals” treatment. I noticed this shot from our (brief) stop at Beauly during our trip to Scotland in the fall of 2012 several months ago and have had it on my “to-do” list ever since.
I finally got around to it this past weekend. and after struggling through re-learning all the software that I need to create these images, I finally came up with the image above.
It’s actually quite fitting that I finally got around to creating a new “Portals” piece over this past weekend, and very much in keeping with the “coming full circle” quality of this particular experience: I’ve been thinking seriously about it for several weeks, and two days after creating and posting this, I booked flights to return to the UK for the singular purpose of expanding on this theme and growing the catalog.
I did not know that I would be creating the “Portals of Stone” series until several weeks after I returned from my Celctic Pilgrimage to the UK in the spring of 2013. And now that the idea has taken root (and seems to be spreading some), I’ve been jonesing to back to that part of the world with that specific purpose in mind.
So come October 7, I’ll be returning to the UK for two weeks. I’ll be flying into Glasgow to see the Cathedral there, which is one of the more spectacular creations of this kind of architectural still standing intact in the UK (so many others were destroyed in the wake of the Dissolution).
From Glasgow I will be heading into Dumfries/Galloway to see (at least) the ruins of Sweetheart Abbey and Caerlaverock Castle, and then I’ll head east to Aberdeen to see St. Andrews Cathedral and Dunnottar Castle. After that, I’m not sure. I might even hop over to Tipperary, Ireland to see the Rock of Cashel.
I mention all this because, after I post this download, I suspect it’s going to travel some. If you’re a new visitor to this site and perhaps live anywhere near the areas I’ve just described, please get in touch with me, perhaps I can visit and avail myself to some of your local knowledge.
