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River Clay series

While wandering the random places in southeastern  Utah, we took a road that lead to nowhere. Yet to get to nowhere we had to cross a riverbed.

Thankfully it was dry, but not quite dry enough. So we stopped and I became fascinated with the slowly drying clay bottom that had been flowing with recent runoff from late spring snows.

The riverbed was firm enough to walk on and had these marvelous patterns of drying clay that captured my imagination.

I spend an endless amount of time over an hour recording these patterns and was sufficiently inspired that I had to take a nap soon after. (This is a way to say I lost track of time and the mental energy involved in creativity is significant enough to have me need to recover.)

This photo session happened at a time when I had vowed to make nature more interesting in my prints. I was distorting and beginning to merge a couple of images together at that time.

This series is an historical example of the manipulation of my images after capture as a way to inject my own experience and vision into that time of discovery.

This series is from about three years ago and is still one of my favorites, showing a break-thru in my artistic journey.