Threshold Guardians

The symbol often is more potent than the thing itself.  Through distillation Symbol can appear to become the thing itself.  I try to approach my art in that way.  A reduction and simplification of shape that still has meaning and still tells story.

Wallace Stephens did it with words.  He says this poem is not an idea about a thing but the thing itself.  However it is his reality and his presentation of the thing itself.  It is still his idea.  In this poem he explores the nature of reality and is searching for the recognizable in the unknowable.

"Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself."

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

Wallace Stephens

It is still March but not much longer.  Officially it has been Spring for seven days but still not warm enough for nature to fully wake. 

Above and below I have posted images of my cut steel garden art "Threshold Guardians" personifying adventure, edges and boundaries. These photos were taken in the last snow of the season and the landscape, draped in white, became simple shapes, reduced to the idea of things and though less familiar, more understandable.