From Radians to Drifting Meadows...

And then, it ended. I never set out to do a specific number of Radians drawings, I just did what I needed to do and it ended up being twelve. At that point, I had drawn it all and worked through a lot of what I needed to. I had by and large recovered almost fully and wanted to stop thinking about the illness. Fortunately, I have been able to keep it at bay ever since then, and with proper care and the right choices it should never trouble me again. Here's hoping.

One thing that did become a haven of sorts later that year was the discovery of the Cox Arboretum metropark, near Dayton and about 30 minutes from our new home. My wife and I first ventured there on a swelteringly hot day in the late summer of 2006. I was smitten. Probably much more so than my wife who, while no shrinking violet, generally has an averse reaction to bugs, dirt, weeds, and temperatures over 90 degrees. To me though, the Cox Arboretum was almost paradise. Acres and acres and acres of meadows, fields, and forests, much of it well maintained but still oddly untamed. Nearer the lodge, the grounds are carefully landscaped and full of stunning wildflower arrangements, ponds literally swarming with fish and turtles, a butterfly garden, and so on. It was a wonderful, peaceful place to be, especially in high summer.

For that first trip, I brought along the pinhole camera my friend Fred had made for me in the body of an old plastic snapshot camera. This was a fixed lens kind of thing, about as crude as possible. I'm not sure if it was due to Fred's inexperience making pinhole cameras or by intent, but this thing shot incredibly blurry, distorted photos which took on a surreal, hazy dreamlike quality at times. You can see some of my earliest efforts with this camera in the Night Lights section of this blog, where I experimented with the long exposure times and the blurring.

Anyway, I shot an entire role of photos at the Arboretum that day, and while very few of them turned out, the ones that did charmed me utterly. The five prints I saved had gorgeous, muted colors and strange distortions that called to mind the biology filmstrips I had watched as a child in elementary school in the early 1970s. Everything about these photos seemed to bring the green world close at hand, almost intimately so, and I can still feel the sun and smell the earth when I look at these. A nice antidote to the Radians, I think.

Oh, as you may have noticed, in looking back at all the drawings and comics and photographs I've made over my lifetime, I've taken to seeing them as grouped into thematically consistent groups I've been calling "Works," especially on this blog. While many of these Works overlapped, each exists independently, and I've yet to really understand the progression that led from one to the other. One thing I have noticed is how often other things I have seen have influenced later projects. The upcoming Cox Arboretum pinhole photos I'm about to post came to be called "The Drifting Meadows" in my mind. This is, oddly enough, a reference to a card from a fantasy-based collectible card game called Magic: The Gathering which I have indeed played many times. In this game, you get a whole bunch of different kinds of cards. Some are creatures that you use to battle, some are spells that you use to enhance creatures or hurt your enemy, some are pieces of equipment called artifacts that change abilities, and others are simply land cards. These land cards give you mana, or magic, which are like points you use for your other cards. I was always fondest of these land cards because they often contained beautiful landscape paintings and imaginatively fantastic names for land. My favorite card of all time was one called "Drifting Meadow," shown below. It seemed like heaven to me. Huge meadows atop floating slabs of stone drifting quietly and peacefully through a warm cloudscape. I've never forgotten this.