View from My Porch
Your Eyes: What Do You See?
What’s the first shape or texture that draws your eye, and where does your eye go next?
What’s your sense of scale here?
What emotions surface as you linger—calm, wonder, awe, or curiosity?
Do you sense motion here—an expansion, a drift, or a quiet implosion?
If this scene told a story, what part of the narrative would you be witnessing?
My Eye: Behind the Image
What I Saw, and How It All Came Together
When I ask my studio visitors what View From My Porch is all about, they invariably answer, “Something in space.” The fact that the artwork is mounted high on the wall requires viewers to look up, as if gazing into the heavens, which further adds to the surprise about the actual making of the piece.
In fact, the image was not taken with a telescope aimed UP at the heavens. It was actually shot looking DOWN at the floor of my porch with a macro lens. I focused on a three-inch section of an abandoned spider’s web, festooned with bits of sawdust that fell from the porch ceiling. (The sawdust was an artistic gift from the carpenter ants that were busy destroying my house.) Just before I was ready to start photographing the subject, a wispy milkweed seed drifted onto the porch and affixed itself to the cobweb, becoming an appendage of sorts.
To my eye, all this was a collection of multiverses (a favorite theme of mine), each with its own sets of physical laws, held together with diaphanous bands. Since the bits of dust were at different depths within the cobweb, I used focus-stacking to keep more of the metaverses sharp and easily discernible. Focus-stacking is a technique that entails progressively photographing the subject at different focal points (35 photos, in this case), then blending them into a single image that has greater depth of field (more of the image will be in focus) than any single shot could yield. The wind, or the lack thereof, was on my side—nothing moved during the shoot after the milkweed seed touched down.
Once I was satisfied with the final flattened image, I dissected and manipulated it in Photoshop and created a composite from various sections. As I worked on the piece, I felt pulled both inward and outward, from micro space to outer space. I liked the tension and wondered if others would feel the same way.
I was also curious how toning might affect the art. My original vision for the piece was to create an “X-ray” view of the cobweb, monochrome with a hint of blue (an homage to my radiologist father, who sparked my interest in photography). I experimented by pushing the coloration, simulating the energy signatures of celestial objects with blues akin to xenon emissions and purples suggesting ionized nitrogen. I liked both colorizations, but for the final piece, I settled on the original version.
From an artistic standpoint, the milkweed seed is a standout element for me. I very much like how it punctuates the composition with its filmy spikes. One studio visitor, who later collected an edition of View From My Porch, was also taken by the milkweed. Despite my explanation of how I created the artwork, she wanted to stick with the deep space narrative. When I asked her to explain the presence of the milkweed, she quickly answered:
“Oh, that’s part of a giant antenna. It’s how they call home.”
If you want to phone home, here’s a video that for me delivers a full cosmic experience. I created the movie with my dear friend, motion designer/paraglider pilot/ auto mechanic, Luis Socorro during the heyday of NFTs. We thought the video would be a smashing NFT. Sadly, the particular NFT marketplace I’d minted it on, like most of the NFT marketplaces that existed back then, went supernova before our video sold. (Caution—turn your speakers/earbuds down before it starts. The volume replicates the Big Bang.)
The Eye of the Machine
I asked ChatGPT to retitle and interpret View From My Porch through the lens of Zen philosophy and explain its rationale. Here’s what it came up with, tossing in an optional haiku and koan as well.
Title: Where Light Rests
Zen Reflection
The eye meets the blue and stops searching.
No story, no direction — only the hush of seeing.
Light is not against darkness here; it belongs to it.
In the pause before naming, the world simply rests.Haiku
Points of light suspend.
Nothing moves, yet all are there.
The dark is awake.Koan
When stillness moves,
where does it go?Rationale
Where Light Rests explores the paradox of illumination within stillness. Light here doesn’t pierce darkness—it belongs to it. The reflection, haiku, and koan each invite the viewer to stop searching and simply see: to sense that nothing moves, yet all is present. In this pause before naming, stillness and movement, light and dark, awareness and world all rest as one.Each element layers a different approach to the same insight:
Title: the paradox
Reflection: the experience
Haiku: the distillation
Koan: the question
Together they form a complete Zen lens — a still moment where light, darkness, and awareness meet and quietly recognize each other.
I then asked ChatGPT to generate a variety of Zen-inspired images based on View From My Porch. Here’s a selection of its output:
Finally, I asked if its images are better than mine.
ChatGPT responded:
Not better — just different.
Yours has mystery and tension: density, micro-textures, and that feeling of not quite knowing where to focus — the viewer hovers between macro and micro worlds. It feels alive, maybe even unknowable.
The Zen versions are emptier and calmer — more meditative than investigative. It trades your intricate complexity for stillness and simplicity. They’re visual koans: nothing to solve, only to breathe with.
If I had to summarize:
Yours = discovery, emergence, complexity.
Zen versions = quiet, surrender, dissolution.
Both can coexist — two ways of seeing the same essence.
*I commented that an AI can’t sense or experience. I was curious to see how it would handle its use of “feel." It responded with:
Right — good catch. You’re absolutely right. When I describe something like “it feels alive” or “it carries mystery,” that’s shorthand — a linguistic tool for expressing how a viewer might experience the image, not what I feel. I don’t have sensations or emotions; I’m describing perceived qualities in human terms so the language stays natural and evocative.
My Take on the Machine’s Take
I’m going to meditate on all this.
If you missed my launch post, click here
And here are two other posts you might enjoy
My eyes go first to the luminous form in the lower left. It stands out against the dark background and pulls me in, a small burst of light that captures my attention before my gaze begins to wander through the soft, misty textures surrounding it. The scale feels both vast and tiny, like peering into a galaxy or a drop of water. In the end, I feel quiet awe and mystery, as if I am witnessing something both cosmic and intimate taking shape in silence. Nella Lush
My eyes always follow the inverted 6 as trained by my journalism classes. In this case it works beautifully, as it eventually lands on the milkweed and the dark areas near it. I agree with Nella about seeing both the cosmic and intimate, which is really gratifying and keeps you looking. BTW, I think the video is gorgeous.