Searching For Circularity (2)

Whenever I launch the drone, I get a lot of satisfaction searching for repetitive patterns. Here, for instance, is a circle within a circle, the roof of a washroom shelter in a Humber River park.

For me later, in the editing room, it presents a puzzle I need to solve.

The cyclist riding by probably views this structure as a functional but brutalist chunk of architecture, at best a rest stop or shade from rain or sun. But seen from the sky, viewed as raw shape, it’s intriguing, its form mirrored by a curving path on one side and the rounded cement structures on the other.

I wouldn’t call it pretty, but the pattern itself is compelling. So I began to play with it, editing the image, and came up with this abstraction.

Now the shapes have been simplified, with the frankly ugly colours of the original rendered in pastel tones. And the graffiti, freed of their previous context, make a different kind of statement.

Meanwhile, the cyclist observer who played such an important part in the original story, has become a distraction within this abstraction. So, poof, he or she has simply disappeared.

What started as simple documentation ends as the artist’s vision.

Now we’re in another season. You’ve seen these shapes on the surface of an iced-up pond before, but here’s a new view.

I call these “ice spiders”, and imagine them crawling hungrily toward the shadow of a tree they intend to ravage (the shadow, I imagine, not the tree). Each spider is encircled by a ghostly round aura, although not the two on the left, which I imagine are pausing to mate, and perhaps coalesce.

Such fantasies, Timothy.

Finally, here’s a farm pond I discovered in autumn, perhaps more a heart than a circle. But the shape was round enough to appeal to me.

The image satisfied me particularly because the form of the shoreline was echoed by the island – another satisfying repetitive pattern.

I like the bridge that straddles the water too, maintaining the vital connection between island and mainland. And the reflected clouds.

At the top of the image, I notice how the contrasting blue fences open up, bidding us welcome to the pond encircled by woods.