Stone Garden

Artwork ID # 2306-36727-13

" Draw alongside the silence of stone until its silence can claim you."
- John O' Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

When first stumbled upon, this intimate place in the High Sierra, spoke to me as if it were an ancient Chinese painting or a Japanese Zen garden. A garden of longevity .

My awareness of a small space speaking of a single reality. An expression of endless, powerful forces within our earth, underlying a seemingly disjunct phenomena of nature. But one where a certain order appears within the chaos of these forces. an occurrence which cannot be translated by cognition, or ordinary discourse. But something which for me became the intuitive awareness of a visual description conveying my original impulse.

And allowing a certain ambiguity for a viewer to participate in her or his own construction of personal meaning.

For me a depiction of deep time creating a dialogue between myself and the cryptic utterances of powerful earth forces.

This area, referred to on maps as the Alabama Hills, is just outside of Lone Pine, California and sits beneath the shadow of Mount Whitney and the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains, near the geologically complex Inyo Mountains. A rare place on earth where geological science interweaves with artistic beauty. The very weathered volcanic rock is dated to be 150-200 million years old.

CaliforniaSierra NevadamountainsAlabama Hillsgranitelichen

From Wilderness Series Archive - "An ARCHIVE of every WILDERNESS SERIES image"