I'm Repeating Myself

    I hadn’t hiked up the trail to Kinney Lake for probably 20 years.  As always, I had my camera with me and stopped in various places to take photos.  As one walks, the view one gets of a mountain changes and when you take a photo, you can zoom in or out or can move the camera from one side to the other in order to compose the shot, so there is a lot of variability and possibility in what the final photo might  look like.  At one point on the hike, I looked up, and decided it was a good place to take a photograph, so I stopped, aimed my camera up at Mt. Robson, and it immediately struck me that, that was the exact spot and view I had of Robson back in the 1980’s when I took a photo that I later used for a painting.

    I began to realize that my brain was “hot wired” to “like” certain compositions, and even after that long interval of years, I was composing things exactly the same and at the same spot.  The photo on the left is the one I took on my recent hike, and the one on the right is the one from the 1980’s.

    This idea that I keep repeating the things hot wired in the brain was re-enforced last week.  I needed to do a cartoon, and of course, coming up with an idea is always the most difficult part of doing one.  I finally got an idea--woodpeckers are periodically hammer on the house, and so my idea was that a woman in the house was complaining to her husband that he hadn’t done anything about scaring the woodpecker away, and now it had broken through the walls of the living room.

    Having come up with an idea, I drew the cartoon and was relieved that the pressure was off for another week.  After I emailed the cartoon in, I was going to move the cartoon into a computer file under “Birds.”  When I tried to move it to “Birds,” I got the message  that I already had another cartoon named “Woodpecker.” 

    I didn’t remember it, so I opened it to see what it was, and it was exactly the same idea, only instead of the woman standing in the living room looking and the woodpecker and the hole in the wall, she was in bed with her husband and the woodpecker had broken through the bedroom wall.  It was one I must have done years ago.

    I seems that my brain is set for certain things and I keep coming back to them even though I used it before.  

You can see my painting "Mt Robson" at:  www.davidmarchant.ca