Art Show on a Brick Wall, or the Lost Supper

The best cam­era is the one in your hand. Chase Jarvis

The upside of cliches is that they point us to images of deep beauty or truth. The down­side is that every­one is point­ing to the same things. Still I am find­ing myself drawn to cliches these days. I am lik­ing the moon on the water. I am lik­ing the wind in the trees. I am lik­ing that an iphone photo from a com­mu­nity din­ner in down­town Bend has ele­ments of sur­re­al­ism in reflected paint­ings on the brick wall across the street, a Mary earnestly at the side of a man with a beard, and a cas­cade of lights trail­ing down from the sky. Etc.

The acqui­es­cence to the power of the cliché…is that a sign of my mel­low­ing or an early sign of my dis­ap­pointed men­tal soft­en­ing. Inside it feels like a let­ting go of some of the cyn­i­cism I needed in ear­lier decades of my life. That is a good thing, and a funny thing. I won‘t be buy­ing glossy prints of Ore­gon coast sun­sets, but I won‘t give up on the moon or the sea as wor­thy images in my writ­ing if I can breathe a lit­tle new life into a far, for­got­ten cor­ner of either one of them. Some­how that would make me smile.