Caged birds and chandeliers...same day, different places. They just seemed to go together well.

I'm taking a brief break from my own photos here to post a photo essay that my mother took on her recent journey on a small boat, exploring the stunning fjords of southern Chile.
My mother, like so many women in our family line, is an adventurer.
Me, I vacillate back and forth between my feminine side and my rough-and-tumble side. But my mother is a more stable soul. She has always been exceptionally beautiful. During her college days, they tried to recruit her as a fashion model, but true to form, she turned them down flat. She was and is a tomboy, an independent spirit, an artist, an traveler and a fly fisherman.
Each winter, she travels with her partner to the wilds of Argentina and Chile for a month of fishing. These are some shots from their most recent journey.

View from the boat.


My mother is an artist who paints mainly birds and wildlife in oils, so many of her photographs are studies for her work.
She is also an expert fly-fisherman, whose casting technique is so lovely that she has been used in demonstration videos. She generally has the honor of catching the largest fish on any given trip. Most of this is catch-and-release.
A haul of crabs ready for the evening meal.

Ta-da!
Dessert.

Local flora.
Local fauna.
The shipboard chef making pasta by hand in the galley. Impressive, no?

A change in the weather.

My critter Friday?
Sea birds aloft.
This is my favorite shot of the bunch.
Untracked territory.



My mum. She makes me proud. Doesn't she look happy?

This venerable fellow could have been a shot from the zoo...but most likely he has never seen a human being before.

Well, it's March, and time for a change of palette. My colors this month are green and grey, and all their permutations.
I spent the morning, with Q in her stroller, perusing the paint chips at a local big box. There are few idle indoor occupations I enjoy more than perusing paint colors. No, I have nothing that needs painting, but I thought it would help me to wrap my mind around the new month and its new colors.
It's not easy to change mental gears when you have spent a month immersed in a certain color palette, seeing, photographing everything through that particular lens. That, and I thought green and grey would be challenging in my own personal environment since these are not colors that exist in my home (though I once saw a wall painted a color called "oyster", and I will someday have a wall that color, somewhere. It was very chic).
But I decided to start off the month by snapping little snippets of things around the house, which helped me to discover that there is more green and grey in my home than I ever imagined, at least on a small scale.
Also, a friend (you know who you are!) has been asking me to show off some of the loot I sent home from San Francisco, and this seemed like a good way to do it. Here, a table runner from Japantown and some pieces from my beloved collection of miniature designer classic chairs.
Possibly the purchase closest to my heart: a beautiful beetle from Paxton Gate on Valencia.
The beetle serves as replacement and proxy for my beloved blue Brazilian butterfly that my parents bought me at Deyrolle in Paris when I was small. The butterfly still occupies its place on a dresser in Brissac, and I have waited all these years to find its replacement. It had to be the right bug in the right place at the right time. As soon as I saw the painted monkey on a sandwichboard on that San Francisco sidewalk, as soon as we walked in the door of Paxton Gate with the lion's head frozen in mid-roar overhead and the marmosets cavorting ghoulishly over the cash register, I knew I had found the right place. It took me two days to decide that I had found the right bug, but in the end I purchased the first one that had caught my eye, in all his whiskered, striped glory. And I love him.
The robots are not a recent purchase - those were discovered in an antique shop on Tennyson the first year we moved to Denver.
On a side note, relating to toys and their decorative properties: At the age of 21 and living out my first year in New York City, I had - briefly - a boyfriend who's sister was a Victoria's Secret model. The boyfriend was quite stunning in his own right - rangy and lean, dressing, like James Dean, in white t-shirts and faded Levis, and with the same heavy, brooding brows and thick swatch of red-gold hair. At the time, he was living in his sister's wonderful multi-level, exposed-brick apartment in the West Village, while she was experiencing the peak of her career on the West Coast. The apartment had been decorated by the sister and her boyfriend, who had the most delightful collection of vintage toys - Transformers and robots and space men. The apartment was quite stark - just white walls, blond furniture, black-and-white photos and distressed brick. But every nook, cranny, shelf and lip of wall was populated by those wonderful vintage toys. This was the 80s, before the style of decorating with toys had become so wildly trendy.
I have never forgotten that apartment, and it influences me still.
From my collection of vintage car ads.
Our wall of pictures.
Things collecting dust. Our daughter has a way of pulling books out of our overstocked shelves that we have forgotten about, and forcing us to revisit them. I'm not sure how she makes her selections, but she has interesting taste. Gibran's The Prophet is one of her favorites. But her alltime most consistent choice is Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Bronislaw Malinowski's dense and somewhat painful tome on his time living with the Trobriand people of a small Pacific island chain near Papua, New Guinea. I'm not sure what draws Q to this particular work, but she seems a bit obsessed.
Another in our hoard of pulp Westerns.


The inspiration wall over my computer desk.


Stacks of work in progress.
When you are the parent of a toddler, toys drift in the corners of every room like windblown snow.
A collage from my roadtrip years.


Sonny Angel. What is it about them?
More miniatures. They make my heart glad every time I look at them.
My beetle, finding his place.