SAWADEE and PANOM for the NEW YEAR.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
I’m pleased to announce a brand new shape to my web site with new navigation features, new galleries, music and video. I would also like to introduce a new project.
THE ONE-WINGED BODY-
a collection of figurative photographs I took on Crete and in Sicily in the mid-1990’s with recent poems by writer and poet Peter Weltner. Images are available on my site where you can also experience a video with several poems narrated by the poet.
We hope to publish a book of this collection this year and in an effort to raise production funds, we’re offering some remarkable specials you can find on my web site. There is the Portfolio Collection which has all thirteen photographs printed, mounted and signed with accompanying poems,signed by the poet, all encased in a hand-crafted black silk portfolio box. This collection is in an edition of twenty-five sets. You can also find the One-Winged Body Poster in the Poster Gallery.
This series of images and poems is not a collaboration, as such. It is a natural weaving of the creative spirit and came into being with a rich history. In the early 1980’s, I had an exhibition at Foster-White Gallery of figurative paintings done on plexiglass in a reverse process. Peter Weltner and a friend, visiting Seattle from San Francisco, saw the exhibition and each purchased a work. Several years later I had the good fortune to meet Peter in San Francisco. In 1983, I moved to Port Townsend where I first met poet Sam Hamill. On our first meeting, Sam saw the paintings and asked for slides. I accommodated. Thereafter, almost weekly, I received in the mail a poem by Sam, written as a response to one of the paintings.
This natural confluence of banded spirits eventually became a book entitled Passport and later shaped within a multi-media presentation, with music by Jon Brower and photographs by Fritz Dent.
Now, some thirty years later, Peter recently wrote to me; we exchanged a few emails and I sent him one of the photographs. From this came the first poem. More photographs, more poems. And now, like Passport, the images and poems have become what Lewis Hyde calls “‘gift-increase’, linked by a common element of eros, or relationship, bonding, ‘shaping into one.’”
NEW ON THE SITE is a short video work entitle Red Butterfly, a meditative comment on both the brevity and fragility of a single life. The model is a close-up portrait of a young man I photographed in 1991. The startling still image flickers and flutters like a film clip from the earliest days of film. It is a paean to the sea of lives lost to AIDS and is dedicated to my brother Gray who fell in the tidal wave of the late 1980’s and to all of us affected with and by HIV/AIDS.
And please visit me on my new FACEBOOK PAGE where I hope to engage with both old and new friends. If you do, or if you’re here at Facebook already, I invite you to visit ‘discussions’ and also the ‘riddle page’.
If you like puzzles or riddles, and if you’d like to win a signed and shipped 10″ x 12″ limited edition image from any of the series listed in in my web site, then you can go there and check it out. Feel free to turn THE RIDDLE over, pry it apart, and even exact information from me…but it won’t be easy. You won’t find the answer on google.
OTHER PROJECTS:
Watch for developments on the E-book ‘Panom and The Stone of Light‘. I hope to have this finished and available very soon. This project will help support Friends of Woodland Park Zoo Elephants in their tireless effort to free Chai, Bamboo and Watoto, and get them to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee …SO THAT
COULD BE
I hope you like the new site.
Blessings and Panom,
Galen
PS: For the eagle-eyed, the word diminutive is misspelled in the riddle page within my site, but has been corrected on Facebook. It’s misspelling, by the way, is not part of the clue.
