[Sharon Passmore]

Meanwhile, back in Kansas... Earlier I revealed the physical process of generating a photo blend. Now I will tell you that the artistic process depends on random chance. That's what I love about making the blends. It is not apparent right away if it will work or not.

I started with taking the 2 required photos and cutting them horizontally and then stacking them in stripes. This resulted in an image that was way more complicated than I usually want for a blend but so be it.

As I was working, the source photo started to be obscuring the image of my son quite a bit. There is a grid right across his face. Still, somehow I liked it because it reminded me of summer; banners waving; cleaning up the coolers after a picnic; lanterns; juice boxes.

The two source photos remind me of summer too. The first was taken at a yard sale in summer. The plastic items are in a messy pile and this also related to the finished piece for me, random chance again.

[Ann Drysdale]

Well, I propose that Pat and I should vote for each other (her entry introduced another element, a tactile suggestion of welds and waxdrips, joining my entry to Sharon's) and I'm sure she'll join me in a huge vote of thanks to Sharon for proposing this drill. I've enjoyed the challenge of using what raw materials I had to offer even though it was not what Sharon originally hoped for. I am delighted by the notion that our working processes seem to have been mirror-images. Sharon began with two fixed pictures and, in blending them, invited the intrusion of the random, whereas I began by extracting random elements from the pictures and combining them into a fixed idea (though I tried to hide it in a playful, obscuring form).

Riddles are a good way of joining poetry to the other arts. I worked with a sculptor on a large piece at the entrance to a riverside walk in the town where I live, a seriously impoverished post-industrial landscape. Seven standing stones...

The Riddle of the Seven Stones

My first is in beech but not in pine
My second’s in coal but not in mine
My third is in seam but not in wheel
My fourth is in iron but not in steel
My fifth is in nant but not in river
My last is in always but not in forever

(The last stone has the answer to the riddle, carved on its flat top.)