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Here’s a quote from Marc Bekoff’s “The Emotional Lives of Animals.”

“Domesticated humans have a long and troubled history with the wilderness that exists at the edges of their civilization. We try to tame it and keep it at bay, but we almost never just leave it alone. Perhaps we can’t, and it’s not really our fault. Wilderness is considered “wild” for a reason…”

- Marc Bekoff

A new project (whether it be a film or a painting) always begins with an image popping into mind. Most images pop and dissolve. But some stick around (patient and persistent ghosts) until I take the time to explore.

About a year ago I started seeing an image of a girl on a horse. It’s recurred often enough and feels charged enough to be the seed of a new film. I’m hesitant to dive into a new film project ’til I’ve wrapped up the initial marketing push for SISTER BEE. But feel ready to begin a quiet exploration of where this image could lead.

My first inquiry brought me to Diane Kennedy, of Equine Assisted Growth and Learning in Boulder. Diane works with people and horses in a therapeutic setting. She’s started a beautiful project that connects mothers of teenage girls with wild mustangs. I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Diane back in February and our conversation opened a whole new world of inquiry. It’s two months later and I’m still reading about wild mustangs, thinking about girls and horses and letting things settle until I feel clear about what the next step will be.

Ooh! I had the exquisite pleasure of checking out the Martin Ramirez exhibit at the Folk Art Museum in New York a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been feasting on memories of the show ever since.

Ramirez (who’s work was unfamiliar to me before I saw it in New York) was an outsider artist, a schizophrenic who produced nearly 300 drawings during a fifteen year confinement at the DeWitt State Hospital in California.

Seeing the show gave me the feeling of peering at a map of the human mind. Ramirez’s drawings have an urban quality. They’re dominated by tunnels and orderly processions of trains, cars, iconic cowboys and deer nibbling at the edges of suburban gardens.

Ramirez’s use of strong black lines to define man made spaces brought to mind the sketches an inspired engineer might make in the early stages of planning a city or highway. Precise. Lines and stripes. Light and dark. Flat and deep. Paper bags patched together to make a beautifully layered surface just right for each drawing.

What is a tunnel to an engineer? A city? A garden? Are the human environments we build for ourselves the inevitable conseqence of our human minds? Or a freak accident based on a long forgotten circumstance a long time ago?

I love this stuff. If you’re in the neighborhood consider checking it out. The exhibit runs through April 29th.

One of my favorite beekeeping books is “Toward Saving the Honeybee” by Gunther Hauk. Mr. Hauk writes about honeybees in a detailed and poetic way. Here’s what he has to say about beeswax (my painting medium):

“Beeswax, the product of an animal that has been considered sacred in almost every culture throughout history, is indeed a very special and precious substance. It has been used with great reverence in many religions for ceremony and ritual. The aesthetic beauty, the fragrance, and the multitude of uses that beeswax offers to man are in themselves accomplishments. The bee, in its simplest acts of life. reveals to us a constant stream of wondrous synthesis, industriousness and transformation.

Whereas other types of bees and wasps use materials from nature to build their combs (living plants, earth, old wood), the honeybee alone creates the substance for the comb in her own body, out of her bloodstream. We can marvel at the significance of the bees’ nourishment, which is the nectar of flowers – the finest of substances produced by the plant. This sap or nectar results from a unique combination – a synthesis – of physical substances (mostly oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen) together with that cosmic force that enables all life on this planet: light.

It is this purest and most ennobled of food substances that the bee ingests, assimilates and converts into bee ‘substances’, including blood. Just as our bones crystallize out of our bloodstream – (beautiful to observe in the growing embryo) – so the bee’s blood is transformed into wax that is ‘sweated’ out in thin, wafer-like, almost translucent white plates on the underside of her abdomen…”

- Gunther Hauk

I was feeling blue today so I typed the words “something beautiful” into Google in a wistful attempt to cheer myself up. This is how I stumbled onto Something Beautiful – a neat little blog with more or less daily links to beautiful thoughts and images. A visit to the Faberge egg page followed by a visual trek to the Aran Islands (taken with a cup of black tea) did the trick. Enjoy!