CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Remembering Artists From Another Time: Botero

There are three lines drawn in the sand. The wind blows, the lines scatter in the wind. Nature observes the fragile agreement. What will time remember? Maybe the transience of time and space.

“Will the wind remember

The names it has blown in the past?” — Jimi Hendrix

I merely urged my camera to explore the celluloid possibilities. I needed the adventure. I needed to cross boundaries in time and space. I needed to know what might be seen if I ventured across the dare. There is a purpose I imagine every day. If I cross over the line, a new discovery will be ahead.

I saw the great cannon in Jacques Offenbach’s operetta, “A Trip to the Moon,” an  adaptation of Jules Verne’s  “From Earth to the Moon”. In one morning witnessed nature’s ethereally hallucinogenic stark skyline, a whiteness of naked swans caressing Earth’s contours. I stood with photographer Edward Curtis and director John Ford. The movie, The Searchers, played in my mind. John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards crossed the open plains of Monument Valley.

I spun the ideas, as if they were in my mind, multicolored crinkled cellophane. I rotated my eyes, raised multiple cameras, and fired a single shutter speed as if into a Rubik’s Cube of all three imagined stories. I know the visual highlights were inviting me to seek what the other........

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