Morro Bay Interlude

Morro Bay is gem of a CA State Marine Sanctuary just a half hour over the hill from us.

We loaned our home to our daughter and a passel of young women for a bachelorette party, so we had to suck up the inconvenience and find someplace to stay.  Gray's Inn on the bay wasn't too bad!

Here's a sunrise shot of Morro Rock, the bay's namesake. 

People come from far and near to play here.  Foreign languages intermingle with the rapping of rigging and the cries of gulls.  

Stand-up paddle boarding is a wonderful way of getting close to the wildlife.  I had brown and white pelicans gliding within 20 feet of me, was squawked at by great blue herons resting on moored boats, and enjoyed watching otters harvesting shellfish from hulls, then knocking them against each other to crack them and nibble away.  

A dock moored in the open has been commandeered by sea lions and seals, perhaps 50 wedged between and atop one another.  I've never gotten a good count because they're a big pile of blubber -- when one slides into the water, others just ooze into the vacated space.  This day I noticed a body partially in the water and couldn't tell if the tail was submerged, or maybe the head.  Eventually this seal pulled her head out of the water to take a breath, looked around languidly, and let it drop back under.  Awhile later, the same.  She waved her flippers around a bit, testing the possibility of nudging a neighbor over, gave up and let her head drop in again.  It just wasn't worth the trouble.  These guys are pretty relaxed!

Paddlers, surfers and shorebirds play in the ocean waves north of the Rock.  

Not far east across the dunes are The Stacks.  

                 

The PG&E plant was decommissioned, but The Stacks live on in controversy. Many hate their ugly, industrial intrusion on the beautiful scenery, others who have seen them since, it seems, time immemorial, find them iconic.  Since my parents were reared not far south, these have been part of the view all my life, and I've found them in those old postcards with tinted photos.  So I'm on the iconic side, and I enjoy their juxtaposition with The Rock, each equally massive, one like a smooth, rigidly symmetrical modern sculpture, the other fully natural, textured, and geologically interesting.

Morro Rock is a volcanic plug or neck, one of many that formed near one another 25 million years ago.

This set of volcanos, sitting on the Pacific Plate, traveled north as the North American plate shifted south; they arrived at their present location, 300 miles northward, moving at the pace of a fingernail growing.  I'm afraid they haven't stopped moving!  But for now they make good climbing in San Luis Obispo County, excepting Morro, which is for the birds.  (The web explanations for how to maintain the clarity of photos I download to Blogger is, unfortunately, beyond my current understanding!)

The Rock entertains throughout each day as sun, wind and fog color its character.

Jackson Pollack's Fractals

I ran across the concept of the 'coastline paradox' (previous post) in an autobiography by Benoit Mandelbrot, or maybe in James Gleick's fun book Chaos: The Making of a Theory.  Wandering around in the land of fractals, there's no telling what you'll find.  It turns out Jackson Pollack's paintings are so full of fractal patterns that the experts can distinguish his from fakes 93% of the time by comparing these patterns.  Furthermore, Pollack's paintings have a similar effect on the brain's relaxation response to viewing fractals in art and in nature.  So I wonder if THAT is why his Greyed Rainbow hit me so powerfully when I walked into the modern wing of The Art Institute of Chicago.  
(My July 12th post mentions this experience.  And I wish these photos were in better focus, but Chicago is a bit far to go for a redo.)

Cognitive neuroscientists have come up with the concept of 'fractal fluency' to  discuss people's intuitive attraction to fractals.  The idea is that we've adapted to easy processing of fractal patterns due to our exposure to these in nature, and further that this 'fluency' puts the viewer in a 'comfort zone,' inducing a pleasant aesthetic experience.  

Now there's discussion of 'fractal expressionism' in art, with Pollack as the masthead.  Regardless, some friends have reacted to my art with "What is it?" and "Why?"  My response (which I wish I'd thought of in the moment) is that I'd like to elicit in the viewer a feeling similar to when you're hiking and suddenly come upon a field of wildflowers:  'Oh!  Ahhh!'  Maybe there's some underlying connection here between this hope of mine and the neuroscientists' reasoning about people's reactions to Pollack's paintings.  

But my response wasn't only about pattern.  I think the dynamism captured me in some sort of vicarious kinesthesia.  I could feel Pollack's movement, sense the freedom of his large gestures as he moved on foot around the canvas on his floor.  

So his paintings didn't just relax me, they inspired me!  They shifted something in me!  Once home I covered my studio floor with brown paper, bought a variety of paint store colors and some big, cheap canvases.  Then I went to town
in my Pollack phase...

...which eventually morphed into my own style.