Smart Phone Portraits

A smart phone? It’s something I don’t have. So I don’t understand the draw, nay, obsession from individuals who wonder the planet staring at a tiny screen as if to look away would relinquish their hold on the elixir of life. I wish, like a few of my more sophisticated art friends, that I could say this project was a neutral observation of what is going on around me, but, it’s not. I can’t imagine willingly casting myself into a vortex of aloneness so innocently dressed up in wolves clothes as a “smart” phone. However, I will be honest and tell you that yes, there have been times in my life that I have felt the loneliness of not being involved in such technology that runs rampant through my generation and country. There are times I don’t know what people are talking about, what they are referring too, what they are laughing about. But, then I catch sight of perfect synchronization in a flock of starlings overhead, or the light that catches the subtle color in a woman’s hair as it falls around her shoulders when she leans down to lift her crying child, or a tabby cat perched atop a fence that then leaps and lands with poised grace on a tree branch next to it, and in an instant, as quickly as that loneliness came, it is gone, and I am grateful to hold in my eyes, not someone else’s images bright and flashing from a screen, but my own.