Artemis

One morning in November, 2017, I lay awake just before dawn. My bedroom was completely dark. White light from the street lights outlined the window shades in narrow, utterly beautiful straight lines. I felt impelled to jump out of bed to get my camera but the effort would have been futile. There was not enough light to get even a halfway decent photograph.

Exercising unusual restraint for me, I lay still and asked myself what was so compelling about the scene? Why did I feel so drawn to the inky blackness, and the straight lines that from it?

And then I got it!

Euclid's fundamental postulate states that: "A straight line can be drawn between any two points." From this postulate he derived all of his geometry. Euclid believed he was right and for most of history, we believed it too.

But, of course, Euclid was wrong. A straight line may be drawn between two points only if space is assumed to be empty (and flat.) In reality, space is never empty nor is it flat. Space has particles, it has bumps, curves, waves -- all invisible but definitely present. 

There are no straight lines in nature. Straight lines are the invention of artists. They are a creation of the imagination.

I choose lines precisely because they are imaginary but powerful. Visually, they create direction; they represent energy, speed, life force. They get "straight" to the point.  Nature doesn't do this. But art can.

The form of the straight line, a figment of my imagination, underlies all of my work. All the points in my photographs can be linked by imaginary straight lines.  Light, too, falls into line. (pun intended) It travels through my space directionally -- and in a straight line as well. So does time.  I see it as linear, non-repeating, inexorable.  As Aristotle put it, "Time is an arrow; it proceeds in a straight line." 

Symbolically, I am Artemis, her arrow is my camera.

FLN  2026