My email inbox unfolded with reminders for sales, credit card offers, and grants whose deadlines approached.

One of those grants requires that I put twenty images into Photoshop to resize them, which is tedious and boring. So, I decided the heck with it.

Instead, I am writing about the careful closing of a photographic series that took about two years to call it done.

In the beginning, I had no idea what I was doing until I placed the flowers from outside and from my indoor plants inadvertently on top of a table in my studio where I stored pieces of paper used underneath and over my drawings to help keep them clean.  On these pieces of paper were marks made from doing actual drawings…the marks that fall over the edge in a repeated pattern. Or there are the circular marks required to reboot the ink in pens until I can tell that there is no more ink in the pen to flow.

Because I became aware of the juxtaposition of natural entities and the me-made ones, I was able to build a variety of photographic possibilities. I picked flowers from gardens that were uncared for from the sidewalk on my way down the block to the gym. I picked flowers from the wildflowers or weeds that grow on the bank next to my building’s parking lot.  The peace lilies and similar flowers from my Chinese evergreens in my collection of houseplants, I picked and let dry. Blooms from the seasonal plants I’d buy at the market, I treated the same way. Branches from bushes that I trimmed in my yard or broke off on my walks or grasses that I pulled from the ground, I let dry. There, I also kept ripped-up-mistakes of drawings, bad photo prints or trimmings from recut paper.

I took photographs of what was on the table when I felt like it. On any day when the light was even or shone brightly through the shades on the windows. On Sundays during the winter. On random days when I picked up the camera to find more relationships there.

Delicious outdoorsy smells rose from the table and filled my studio. The accumulation of seed pods and dirt and the seeds from broken seed pods and dried leaves and flower petals and twigs and stalks invited my touching and my moving them around to discover the castaway paper remnants underneath.

My records of these table contents took shape in several photograph series. The first series was composed of 207 photographs. In the next series, I printed over forty of those pictures and drew ink lines around easily traceable elements. In the next group of photographs, I printed enlarged sections of some of the previous forty which revealed even more shape content within the images. I am taking a pause now to print those enlargements and actually isolate the shapes I can find within them to trace by hand.

Ending the seemingly endless process of collecting and drying was inevitable and produced another series of photographs of clearing the table to reveal its whiteness only with streaks of debris remaining.

The emotions that accompanied cleaning up all of this arose. Not only did I think of the cessation of one activity and its transitioning to another, but also, I thought about how this kind of desiccation occurs all the time outside of my studio naturally and will eventually on a large scale where there is no water in the ground or falling from the sky.

Plant life will simply turn to dust. And it will blow away in the hot winds. Perhaps not even have the chance to spread its seeds to spawn new life because the earth’s dirt has itself turned to dust.