Mar 21
Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain?
They circle all around it; sometimes you can’t even see the mountain for the clouds.
But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head.
The clouds never cover the head.
His head pokes through, because the clouds let him; they don’t wrap him up.
They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him.
– Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Mount Robson, BC, Canada
Dec 20
performing her last dance
before descending into the bottomless ocean…
Nov 20
An imitation of an imitation
Sept 20
Let’s go.
We can’t.
Why not?
We’re waiting for Godot.
Ah! You’re sure it was here?
What?
That we were to wait.
He said by the tree.
-Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Aug 20
There is nothing more musical than a sunset.
– Claude Debussy
Bondi beach, Sydney, Australia
Jul 20
A glimpse of heaven from underwater
Jun 20
The story of a bird and a fur seal
May 20
Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
– Oscar Wilde
Sydney, Australia
Apr 20
Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,
“How good, how good does it feel to be free?”
And I answer them most mysteriously,
“Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?”
– Bob Dylan, Ballad in Plain D
Mar 20
manipulating reality
Templetown Church ruins,
County Wesford, Ireland
Feb 20
Singing to an ocean, I can hear the ocean’s roar
Play for free, I play for me and play a whole lot more, more!
– Led Zeppelin, The Ocean
A man playing the guitar on the edge of a cliff
NSW, Australia
Jan 20
To be is to be perceived.
– George Berkeley
Dec 19
Real equality
St Peter’s Church in Woolton,
Liverpool, UK
Nov 19
Sunrise, sunrise
Looks like mornin’ in your eyes
– Norah Jones, Sunrise
Sydney, Australia
Oct 19
…and then, I have nature and art and poetry,
and if that is not enough, what is enough?
– Vincent Van Gogh
E.C. Manning Provincial Park, Canada
Sept 19
In the pines, in the pines
where the sun don’t ever shine…
Aug 19
Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.
– Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Ireland
July 19
Liverpool, UK
May 19
… gain the whole world
but lose your soul…
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
– Mark 8:36 (KJV)
Burragorang, NSW, Australia
Apr 19
Just a little green
Like the color when the spring is born
– Joni Mitchell, Little Green
Kenya
Mar 19
No space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused.
– Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens Statue in Centennial Park
Sydney, Australia
Feb 19
The ending is always a surprise.
– Daniel Wallace, Big Fish
Berlin, Germany
Jan 19
Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free…
– Leonard Cohen, Bird on the Wire
Dec 18
Land really is the best art
– Andy Warhol
Nov 18
Life is a domino effect.
Oct 18
All the world’s a stage…
– William Shakespeare
Sept 18
We are like parallel lines.
We have a lot in common.
We are so close, but we can never meet.
Never be together…
…a sad love story from mathematics.
The Anzac Bridge, Sydney
Aug 18
When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we see
Westland Tai Poutini National Park, New Zealand
Jul 18
Life is both sad and solemn.
We are led into a wonderful world,
we meet one another here, greet each other,
– and wander together for a brief moment.
Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.
– Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World
Maastricht, the Netherlands
Jun 18
Wherever you go
Whatever you do
I will be right here waiting for you
Centennial Park, Sydney, Australia
May 18
I am obsessed with beauty.
I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn’t.
And that’s a tough place to be because you’re never satisfied.
– Robert Mapplethorpe
Inspired by Mapplethorpe’s flower studies
and his characteristic attention to light and shade,
I created this picture.
Apr 18
Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye…
it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.
– Edvard Munch
Lake Matheson, New Zealand
Mar 18
Who are you waiting for?
The Rocks in Sydney, Australia
Feb 18
At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough.
You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it.
It is enough.
– Toni Morrison, Tar Baby
South Island, New Zealand
Jan 18
The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling,
mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice.
He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.
He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best…
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him,
has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.
He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties.
– John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
The artwork in photo: Stephen Marr, Under One Sky,
at Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi 2017
Dec 17
Yesterday love was such an easy game to play.
Centennial Park, Sydney, Australia
Nov 17
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces,
I would still plant my apple tree.
– Martin Luther
looking up from under The Luther Oak,
the location where Martin Luther burned the Papal Bull of
Excommunication in front of the Elster Gate in 1520.
Wittenberg , Germany
Oct 17
The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
– Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Woolloomooloo, Sydney, Australia
Sept 17
What is my life worth even if I remain alive?
Whom to return to in my old home town of Warsaw?
For what and for whom do I carry on this whole pursuit of life,
enduring, holding out – for what?!
– Herman Kruks (1897-1944), diary entry, 30 September 1942,
written with the news of mass murders in occupied Poland hanging over him.
Kruk was the chronicier of the Vilna Ghetto (now Vilnius, Lithuania).
He was murdered in a German concentration camp in Estonia on 18 September 1944.
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, Germany
Aug 17
I dream a dream that dreams back at me.
– Toni Morrison, A Mercy
Overlooking the Rhine
Kaiserpfalz Kaiserswerth, Düsseldorf, Germany
Jul 17
There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.
– Edouard Manet
a fragment of a painting by Edouard Manet (1832-1883)
Die Barke (Monet Peignant dans son atelier) 1874
Monet Painting On His Studio Boat 1874
at Neue Pinakothek – Munich, Germany
Jun 17
No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes.
The cat is the best anarchist.
– Ernest Hemingway
Okinawa, Japan
Apr 17
He has made everything beautiful in its time…
– Ecclesiastes 3:11
Cherry blossoms along the bank of Tama River in Tokyo, Japan
Feb 17
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
The Lennon Wall in Prague, Czech Republic
Jan 17
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech…Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’
The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’
– Genesis 11:1,4,6-7
The view from the 148th floor of The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, UAE
Nov 16
In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
– Aristotle
Lahbab Desert, Dubai, UAE
Aug 16
For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life – the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.
– Claude Monet
Maasai Mara, Kenya
Jul 16
Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.
– C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Maasai Mara, Kenya
Apr 16
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.
Centennial Park, Sydney, Australia
Sept 15
4 Show me your ways, Lord, teach me your paths. 5 Guide me in your truth and teach me,
for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.
– Psalm 25:4-5
English Bay Inukshuk on the Sea Wall, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Aug 15
I life up my eyes to the mountains – where does my help com from?
Psalm 121: 1
Obertauern, Austria
Jun 15
Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows
when the ocean can be so cruel?
She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel…
– Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Apr 15
Mother duck and her ten children
Mar 15
Two women
Maastricht, the Netherlands
Feb 15
A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.
…and there is nothing new under the sun.
– Ecclesiastes 1:4, 5, 9b
Tanyuan Garden in Nanxiang – Shanghai, China
Jan 15
A silent sea of clouds, so peaceful and so calm, underneath it is a colourful world.
Photo taken from a plane window
Dec 14
photo taken at: white swans: River Thames, Windsor, England
black swan: Avon river, Christchurch, New Zealand
Nov 14
The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness…
– Aristotle
the Basilica of Saint Servatius in Maastricht, the Netherlands
Oct 14
We all want progress.
But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be.
And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer.
If you are on the wrong road progress
means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road
and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
– C.S. Lewis
Obersalzberg in Berchtesgaden, Germany
Aug 14
All the world’s a stage
William Shakespeare
Phillip Island, VIC, Australia
Jul 14
Dancing in the sea
Jun 14
Just as darkness is the absence of light, __________________.
__________________, evil is the absence of God.
– Albert Einstein
May 14
Pondering the possibility of a parallel world
Apr 14
Seeking the Tree of Life
Mar 14
A little bit of peace in a busy world
Tai Mei Tuk, Hong Kong
Feb 14
Maroubra Beach, NSW, Australia
Jan 14
Silence is golden
Tallowa Dam, Kangaroo Valley, Australia
Dec 13
Straight path
AND He will make your path straight.
Centennial Park, Sydney, Australia
Nov 13
The coming storm
Oct 13
Sydney Harbour
Sept 13
The Outback
Aug 13
Art Gallery NSW
Jul 13
Art Gallery NSW
