How do you keep 70 years of memories and combine them with your personal art and photography? I hope a blog will work. Blogging will give me the chance to look at my art and photographs and reminisce. I will post my photos and memories to go with them. I will be completely random.
First Post - A digitally altered photo of the rice fields in the countryside around the Li River.
In grade four geography, so many years ago, I was inspired by the photos in my text book and there at age 10 developed an insatiable wanderlust. One favorite picture was a mysterious landscape of a serene ribbon of water winding through a topography of magical mountains. The chapter title - CHINA. I dreamed on day of visiting this land of beauty and to a girl or rural Ohio, mystery. Now I have been there six or seven times if you count Hong Kong, and I have thousands of photos.
When I took my first trip to China in 1984, I was able to journey by boat from Guilin to Yangshou which was just a dusty landing. In this era of few travelers the scene was comparable to that in my fourth grade text. There were no vendors, no straying from the established, supervised itinerary. Subsequent trips saw increasingly more visitors, bigger changes in the setting, and broader access to wandering.
On one trip to Yangshou with my artist friend, Cynci Cutter, we were able to get away from the crowd by engaging a woman with a motorcycle side car to take us to the countryside. We spent the day walking among the villages, navigating the paddy barriers, laughing with the people we met, and feeling the wonder of the natural geography.
