still life with green oranges

still life with green oranges,

pineapple and three bottles

of Mexican beer

I imagine Gauguin or Matisse painting this still life -- a shiny aluminum pan piled with green oranges, one ripe pineapple and three bottles of Mexican beer arranged carefully against an orange wall and table on a street in Playa del Carmen.

flame and reflection

flame and reflection

of flame -- a pillar burning

without and within

Reflection on reflections. A reflection is a flip over a line. This virtual line is called the Mirror Line. It divides the "real" object from its reflected image. Every point in the object and its reflection is the same distance from the Mirror Line line and the reflection has the same size as the original object. In this reflection, we see two candles, one burning on the window sill and the other burning inside the frame of a photograph, lighting up the image of a pear in the center of a coil of rope. The photograph, of course, is an image of an object. And the photograph of the photograph is an image of an image.

four golden cheese wheels

four golden cheese wheels

glowing in a dark little shop

beckon me inside

On the way back from Pisac to Cusco, we stop in a village for snacks at a store catering to tourists. While everyone else is busy buying bottled water, alpaca caps and seed jewelry, I wander outside. Something bright catches my eye in a dark, empty little shop. Two golden wheels of cheese are laid out on a red-trimmed white cloth, like an offering, on top of a glass case containing two more wheels, preserved like precious gems. The strong contrast in illumination, light against dark, reminds me of the chiarascuro still life paintings of the Renaissance and I feel like I've stepped back several hundred years in time.