Diary; July 29th 2020 – Surreal Infections

This has not been a fun week or a fun month. So now I am in the midst of fighting a second infection and taking precautions that the two meds don’t interact. This is also messing with my diet, exercise plan, day-job, and all things creative.  Thank goodness this is not COVID related, but the realization that this might place me into a more autoimmune situation, thus more at risk if I were to become a pandemic infection statistic. The good news; it appears that the meds appear to working okay for now but still in the middle of this…sigh.

Earlier I was looking at my pandemic shelter-in-place project of Organic Abstractions (also like to think related the Southern California ‘Light & Space‘ movement) and I found one image that represents an environmental portrait of the COVID-19 virus, which I posted here. For those who follow me on Facebook, my COVID-19 portrait is now my background photograph for my page signifying our lives in a pandemic.

This morning I was searching for another of my Organic Abstractions that could be a conceptual representative of an active infection, perhaps what could be a medical condition ‘selfie’. My criteria included some small highlights that could represent bacteria and some corresponding white highlight that would represent the white cells which were on the attack in response to an infection. I also needed something with red that could correspond to the cardiovascular system and with some blue that corresponded to my general disposition as a result. I was surprised that I had quite a few to choose from, but settled on this image above, which includes a flow-line through the center that extends towards the background, a really nice representation of the cardiovascular system. The small green highlights clumped in the center look evil enough for me to be the nasty bacterial infection with the white cells in the foreground appearing to be on the attack, while the blue background sets the mood. Cool.

I am not sure that this surreal image would be a print found hanging in a doctors office, hospital or a science journal cover, but who knows?

Okay, maybe I do have a little creative energy but as I have stated before, I am also a science-nerd. Nevertheless as a part of my experiment/play process, this series I stated during the pandemic continues to develop in unexpected ways. Still not sure what my series title will be, but at the moment I guess I can categorize these under a working title of Organic Abstractions for now.

Cheers & stay safe,

Doug

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My other exhibitions and workshops:

The Photographers Eye’s gallery exhibition, Living and Photographing in the Time of COVID-19, group virtual exhibition that includes two of my diptychs from the series A Developing Crisis. This online exhibition is from May 8th through August 1st, 2020.

Medium Photo 2020 Workshop: Developing a Creative Book workshop that I will be leading, is now rescheduled for September 24 – 27th, 2020, a four-day extended weekend workshop in San Diego.

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Featured artwork; Fresnel Coefficients 5307 (Quantum Elements), copyright 2020, Douglas Stockdale