Carrot Art and Life

Daucus carota, the common roadside weed we call Queen Anne's Lace, waves its four-feet stalks topped with palm-sized plates of tiny white flowers in late summer in Indiana.

The weed was introduced here from Europe. It is from this species belonging to the family Umbelliferae (umbel is the type of inflorescence shown by the wild carrot with short flower stalks of equal length like umbrella ribs) that our present-day kitchen carrot was bred.

The disks of white flowers invite photography. From above, from the side, close-up and from afar, the flowers offer endless possibilities for structural beauty. Here is another take on them.

Last night I visited several sites on smugmug.com and went to bed this morning feeling dejected. I've focused on model photograph since coming back from Italy in May and I've enjoyed shooting people and catching the many expressions on their faces and bodies. I just am not sure that I want to be exclusively a model photographer.

This morning, waking up after four hours sleep, I didn't get out of bed to the computer. I read about Dan Brown's first Robert Langdon adventure, Angels & Demons. Friends introduced me to the author last year before his bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, was released as a movie starring Tom Hanks. The debate on the radio, Internet and TV was heated. I loved it. Brown combines elements from history, religion and art, the same topics that endlessly fascinate me. Words are another of my interests, older and I think stronger than images.

In the morning after I get dressed, before I tackle processing my photographs and building my website, I have to write to feel I have started the day. I am a man torn between two worlds. In fact I am a Dionysian devotee, forever being torn in a hundred pieces by my many interests. I stay with an interest long enough to know a little about it without really mastering it then fickle interest moves on. 

I'm like the umbelliferous carrot flower, hundreds of tiny flowerets in a dish, none of them taken by itself spectacular enough to invite closer inspection and only closer inspection shows their grand design and beauty.