[Sharon Passmore]

Well, it's the 20th. It seems silly to have a vote with only 2 entries (mine is ineligible) - what does everyone think?

[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.)

[Graham King]

Originally Posted by Ann Drysdale

Well, it's nearly the 20th, so here's my process.

Sharon posted a picture as a prompt, seeking pictorial responses. I am not equipped, technology-wise, to answer with a picture, but Sharon said I could do a word-response; a new piece that retained the two main images. Grids and circles.

The picture had two different faces. A collage of grid-shapes, all squares and corners and a long line of roundnesses underneth, all different sizes. I searched for something I knew and understood that used those two shape-thoughts to make a third.

Grids with different hole-sizes, roundies with different dimensions. I would make a puzzle-poem, using all the different words I found when I researched the thing that was now in my head.

Royals are potatoes; ware, mid and chat are sizes. Griffin, Tong and Cooch are specialist riddles for sorting them. The Griffin is an oldfashioned wooden one and the Tong is a huge industrial machine. But they all have interchangeable grids for doing their shuddery work. I loved researching this, especially when I found out what "cooch" means in Merkin.

That gave me the idea of presenting my poem as a nudgy sort of thing, with undertones of double entendre. Like the old cryptic poems in the Exeter book that is part of my British heritage.

The answer to this riddle is "riddle".

Very clever!
So a riddle is a large-holed sort of sieve? I may have heard of it but I didn't cotton on till you explained (for which, thanks!)

[Jones Pat]

Ann is right, I loved this drill, hope to see more of them with more poet and artist participation. My process is not nearly as skilled in the medium as Sharon's. I don't even know how to blend, do layers. After reading the prompt and Ann's poem, I copied both photos, put them both side by side, reduced them to the same color value, embossed them...trying to enhance, highlight the "royal gold" in Ann's poem, maintain what I thought looked like a "tong" in the chair backs, then I cut and pasted it all into a new document trying to connect as many lines in them as I could to make it flow. I added the eyes just because I always add eyes if given the opportunity and "coochy coo" gave me it to me...little did I know we were talking potato eyes. : ) Fun! I was way off on interpreting the tongs and royal golds but my mama taught me to say, "I had a good time". : ) And I did. Let's do it again soon. I so miss responding to poems and prompts with SCR and 14 by 14 no longer with us.

Thanks!
Pat

[Sharon Passmore]

Pat - I love that your piece was inspired by Ann's poem as well as the photos. You "welded" them together in a way. I think this playing back and forth is half the fun. If this is your work without having skills in the medium (pshaw) then I can't wait to see what you do with skills. I admire the fact that you used only the two source photos, whereas I depended on a additional image.

On a technical note - I used to hate layers. They can be confusing. Now I love them. I will make a post in the Art forum explaining why.

Ann - will you explain the Riddle of the Seven Stones? I hope I am not the only dense one who doesn't get it. Also, why is there not a sixth?

[Ann Drysdale]

Of course, Sharon. You are not in the least dense - this is an old English riddle form based on the spelling of the answer. It's like letter-Sudoku.

The answer is the "voice", telling you that its first (or second etc.) letter appears in the first word, but doesn't appear in the second.

So, its first letter is in the word "beech" but not in the word "pine". Actually, it's B, though it could have been C or H. The next one is L...

You have to sort out all the letters that it might be and fiddle around with them till the answer bites you in the bum. The words themselves are part of the message the riddle tries to convey.

Beech is a hardwood tree native to this area. When the place was prosperous with coal and iron and steel, pine was introduced and grown to provide pit-props. Coal is the natural fossil fuel, mine the transient man-made means of exploiting it. Seam is where nature put the coal, wheel is the machine for raising it. Iron is what they drew from the soil, steel is what they made of it. Nant is the old Welsh word for the stream that was always there, river the English word for it when it was co-opted into the industrial process. Always and forever, which give the sixth (last) letter - well, they just reflect the thinking of the English poet who now lives here - in BLAINA.

That's the answer and is what is carved on top of the seventh stone. It was my attempt to offer respect for what the people feel they have lost and to suggest that, in the great scheme of things, the Industrial Revolution was just an interlude. Something to think of while you walk along the banks of the Ebbw Fach.

Here's another glimpse of Blaina, and some of the other Valley towns, written by local poet Idris Davies during the Depression and set to music by Pete Seeger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP5gIDrNlrY