A sobering week ending with some great quotes from Ansell Adams, of landscape photography fame

Drawing to Painting classes have ended on the high note of a 3 hr. session. This time we went from drawing to painting. I chose acrylics and apples...


The "sobering" I referred to was that on Thurs. while heading to Queenstown to pick up Riley [old friend and companion of Dougal and I who moved back to Canada a yr. ago, and was in Dougal's class at school, and is back for a holiday] the brakes on my camper truck totally failed at Wanaka's only round-about. Yip, no warning! However as a long time Land Cruiser affectionardo I've always maintained they're a vehicle that is best driven smoothly, and this is what saved-the-day - not driving full-tilt into any situations.

Anyway I switched vehicles and had a lovely drive in sun and snow to pick up Riley.

My New Zealand landscape photography close friend and mentor Roger is in the US at the moment, and he found a DVD all about Ansell Adams (1902 - 1984) the famous US landscape photographer, and he's just emailed me some of Ansell's inspiring quotes...

Love is a seeking for a way of life one that cannot be followed alone, the resonance of spiritual and physical things.

Friendship is another form of love, more passive perhaps, but full of transmission and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship and understanding, a desire to give, it is not a charity that is the giving of things, it is more than tenderness that it is the giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner fold of the spirit. It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the realities of the world, the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men and all the interrelations of these.