182 Image-Content of the Day 2018/08/24 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Eagle overlooking the Sweat Lodge
circa late 80’s ontario
181 Image-Content of the Day 2018/08/23 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
i can’t keep up. Everything is moving too fast. I can’t understand this world. Yesterday it was so easy to believe. It was simple, things meant what they meant. Today everybody changes so fast there is nothing to hang on to. One day this is good for you and the next day it is life threatening. Makes you wonder if you yourself had it right. Maybe i am just as wrong as the rest, maybe things are meant to disappear, maybe life is nothing much at all. I think i best keep praying.
On the Streets, Circa 70’s 80’s 90’s etc.
180 Image-Content of the Day 2018/08/22 of-by patrick weyhttps://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
He stood out in to the night hidden. Light skimming across his mind. Trees folding arms straight into the sky. Shades of waves blending into the walls. His hold firm bold stern cool, lit a cigarette smoked himself into the scene.
Down the streets of Chiang Mai, heat pouring down the road, soft haze full and thick. Light waves swimming dreams thru the atmosphere bending into his blurry stance. The air wading thru the mood late still into the night, he thought, ‘time can be so smooth when you’re lost in a dream’.
Photo Circa Thailand 2017
179 Image-Content of the Day 2018/08/21 of-by patrick wey…https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Eye to eye, face to face, no fear…..Sierra and ‘BigDog’
Circa early 90’s
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Impressions of a water colour artist……
Photo taken off the scum of the canal surrounding the old city of Chiang Mai 2017
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Susan Oxford and her daughter watching planes land at the Toronto Airport.
Circa 80’s in KW On. Can
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Hanging around the bus station.
Circa 80’s in KW On. Can
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My friend Stan Maciaczyk thought he had a nose just like Bob’s. It’s Stans birthday today or yesterday or the day before…wow he is seven zero. This image was taken on my very first roll of film back in the late 60’s or the very early 70’s at my friend Don Tuckers house. Don painted that poster on to his wall in ultra violet paints that glowed in the dark with a black light…..wow
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Andre Bernier and his three kids when they were much younger, Maya, Miles and baby Morgan. Andre passed away suddenly over a year ago. He was an amazing man of wood, anything about wood with wood for wood. I’d like to say we always saw eye to eye, we didn’t but neither of us ever ignored each other and always treated each other with respect. Andre had great integrity and i am sure he is greatly missed by his family, siblings and others. I took this picture in the old school house which is where his family lived. I lived in the front part of the huge one room old school house for a number of years. This picture shows how proud he was to be the father of these three lovely children.
Circa early eighties i beleive
172 Image-Content of the Day 2018/08/14 of-by https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
I need a cafe to serve me words. I need a narrow road that leads to it. I need her to sit there and talk sometimes. There is a war outside the door. I don’t fit in this world. The demand to be is too great for this mind. Leave me alone here where i can write for no reason. My mother is dead, my daughter is dead, my brother is dead, there are many that are dead. The cafe is quiet this afternoon and sun light comes dancing in across the tables. The man in the corner is slowly sipping his tea. He looks around half interested in life but no one bothers him. She is talking again about her dreams and some thoughts about a future she knows will never exist. I look up occasionally and wonder, about nothing much, have a sip of coffee then continue to write words as if i was walking. There is a world outside at war. I never really understood what it was all about. People discontented with their lives, bullies pushing others around. The sun glistens off a wine glass and it looks beautiful for a few moments then disappears. The odd customer comes in, buys something then leaves. The day is normal. There is only the sound of soft people against hard dishes and the occasional street car in the distance. I love life today. She gets up and leaves. I write a few more words.
Image Circa late 80’s, cafe in Kensington Market Toronto; actor & friend Lindsay Stewart
Portrait of an Outsider
Alexandra Zaichanka picked this shot from my archives thinking it fit the literature.
I was listening to a CBC audio doc about Albert Camus’s book, The Outsider (sometimes referred to as The Stranger) which i read years ago. I was inspired and sat down and wrote the last paragraph to a fictitious novel called ‘Inside the Outsider’. A few of my bohemian friends fit this description as well as myself it appears.
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‘Even the Eternal Source is a Reflection’. With that statement i mean that there is no absolute anything, thought made it all up because of our fear of being simply mortal naked apes that think. All the gods, all the absolute laws, all the determinations to use reason to convince the brain that we are superior beings, aliens, creations in the likeness of gods, all definitive conclusions must be on trial endlessly; logic is no more than a tool to create technologies to explore the universe. There is no higher purpose. The eternal source is merely a shade of an infinite refection endlessly moving changing shifting. There is no great mystery that can be known. This denial is the source of all misery in the mind of man.
We have been conditioned with a need to believe in some formula from christ to buddha, to scientific law, politics, to happiness, enlightenment, afterlives to endless comforts and securities to soothe the fear of being in the natural state of simple unknowing clear observations. This is too scary and meaningless for the ego. Man has not changed at all since the cave man in his discomfort with his neighbour and his self, only the weapons have evolved. Think about it, if you can accept the fear to be without any direction home, no ritual to save you, no ceremony to ultimately calm you, no ideal to hang onto forever. There is no certainty in the mind of man, nothing is and never was. We have been fooled by the fears of the saviours, the saints, the holy men, the logicians. The body is all that is immortal, the mind is the illusion that fades and dies.
I am a man walking thru all history with a duffel bag strung over my shoulder hanging off my back and in my mental strength with my one hand holding a knife i slit the bag releasing the tons of beliefs, ideals, concepts, dogma, certainties, absolutes, sciences, securities, identities, words, abstracts, gods and demons and when the mind freaks out i grab the hole in the bag and breathe deep, slowly, grab my composure, resting into the new lesser emptier identity and when i’m strong and brave again i slit the bag once more and do it all over……….keep walking towards the illusion of the eternal source. Freedom from the known is the pathless trail to be. There is no method, like a coyote in the desert one just lives naturally. This may be impossible, but no more impossible than living with the illusions of ones absurd absolute beliefs and certainly much more honourable to the process of creation…………i suppose.
I don’t care what anyone thinks, i have more faith in the eyes of a crow than i do of any man. They are to the point, direct, real and without the illusions of the self fulfilling imagination of man. I move on from there.
circa 2017 Chiang Mai Thailand
170 Image-Content of the Day 2018/08/12 of-by https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
She held me in her hand, swung me to and fro, tripping down this cobble stone road with liquid air bubbling off the melting brick yellow with a sky full with turmoil set against a stage of oceans painted in atmosphere and caressing a magnificent sense of wonder lying in the streets below. Me in the handbag of hopes waving thru the speckled air, transforming into some formless light bending around the air like love in a summer afternoon and her dress free falling as matter disengaging from itself and splattering texture against the wind; she walked free into the day surreal and lovely.
Circa 2001 Montreal, St Paul Street, Old Montreal
169 Image-Content of the Day 2018/08/11 of-by https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Rubin Hurricane Carter and Vernon Harper….Vern had a short lived boxing career, he loved boxing and one of his heroes was Rubin. Long before Rubin came into his life Vern admired him for his boxing and stamina surviving in a prison for almost twenty years for a crime he didn’t do….https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_Carter
Rubin attended a number of sweats down at Verns lodge before the film with Denzel Washington acting out his life as a boxer and prisoner….https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hurricane_(1999_film)
Vern is wearing an honorary Middle Weight Champion of the World belt given to Rubin just weeks before at a ceremony in Las Vegas honouring Rubin. This was one day down at the lodge before a sweat lodge ceremony with the two hurricanes proud. Verns boxing name was Hurricane Harper. The size of Rubins fist is almost the size of my head. Bob Dylan wrote in a song that helped to free Rubin………https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/hurricane.html
LAST THREE STANZAS
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool’s hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed
To live in a land
Where justice is a game.
Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise
While Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell
Yes, that’s the story of the Hurricane
But it won’t be over ’til they clear his name
And give him back the time he’s done
Put in a prison cell but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world.
LIVE PERFORMANCE 1975
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfiK17FhP4g
Photo Circa early 90’s
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Life Can Be Lovely
when i don’t have much time i put up a pretty picture
circa, a few years ago
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Just another pretty picture, it’s all in the composition they say. The overall surroundings looked nothing like this. Some people say you have to have an eye for it; to pick out the gem in the ordinary.
circa 2015 or so, from some antique shop or nursery i believe.
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The Electrician Too – KW On. Can. area
circa late 70’s
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The Electrician – KW On. Can. area
circa late 70’s
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You can’t stage shots like these. Grown ups acting out a taste of their worlds for a flash of a second. Who knows what’s goin on here? Mennonites having fun with my world at their own expense? Possibly they were talking before i got the shot about my camera infatuation and all just a few years before the onslaught of the digital age whereas practically everyone’s a photographer of sorts documenting everything that moves. Us normal white folks used to make fun of the chinese, asians and their obsession with taking a shot of themselves in front of just about every structure on the planet. Nowadays everybody’s doing it. I thought i was unique, perhaps i was.
They work hard, eat fulsome meals, live long lives, pray to jesus and treat the land as a gift from god. Many have a great sense of humour and many live their lives rather like a mule, hard and stubborn. This is just one point of view amidst many; simply for the sake of my image/content for the day. There are moments it feels like an unpaid unappreciated job that must get done. That is the pressure that one impresses upon oneself when one commits to a procedure for whatever reason. One that comes and goes. It is already gone; having fun again. Better quit while things are goin well.
Mennonite Men circa late 80’s but it could have been yesterday.
161 Image-Content of the Day 2018/08/03 of-by https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Death and life walk hand in hand down the road to where?
Past the farms of life for death on top of indian blood
Down the roads where ancestors lived and died
Some in vain some for good and where some still painfully hide
The Heidelberg Hotel serves limburger cheese and mennonite summer sausage on rye bread. I never got to know my dad much as he left my mother with eight children when i was 5 or so. When i was a little older and could do as i pleased i visited him more frequently. A few years before he died i picked him up one day and took him to the Heidelberg and ordered two of the infamous sandwiches. He couldn’t believe there was still a place on this fine earth that served such an ancestral feast…..that and a glass of draft beer. One of the few memories i have left swimming around in this brain some believe is mine. This land held memories long dead passed on beyond the remains weighed down by engraved stone into living eyes here, but this land holds remains of remains of remains as far back as the stars and beyond. We live a short time in the scale of our vast imaginations and time stretches far beyond all that i presume. The i i presume as me has come and will go with a whimper in this mysterious scheme of things.
My ancestors arrived in the neighbourhood in the 1840’s so history says and i came along in the late 40’s of the nineteen hundreds but the previous peoples of this land some claim go back 50,000 years or more. Numbers. None of this matters much to me. There was blood shed, deceit and love as far back as humans walked upon this incredibly beautiful planet. I’ve done my share to walk my walk as best as i can thru contradiction and fiction, to be as i am to be as i am not. These words will crumple as the rye stone returns to whence it came, even the limburger is doomed to become something inconceivable.
In honour of tombstones of limburger cheese and summer sausage and rye bread and beer.
Circa late 80’s
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Two Tough Guys…..downtown of some american city
circa early 80’s
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Shopping in Chicago
circa 80’s
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Bent into the ways of man, with a slim smile…..
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Floyd Buffalo Hand…..Floyd Hand is a full blood Oglala Lakota, descendant of Chief Mahpiya Luta. I got to know Floyd and hung out with him in South Dakota and also north of Thunder Bay at a camp i went to for ten years for 10 days twice a year doing sweats and learning about the red road. I also did sweats with him at Verns lodge in Guelph Ontario. He is one of the most controversial medicine men in north America for many reasons too involved to even mention here. He has a voice like thunder.
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Portrait of a hitch-hiker…..gave him a ride a couple hundred miles from the north to downtown Toronto. We stopped for a pee, i took a photo. A nice man with lots of stories.
circa early 90’s
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This was a place i would go to when times end, the place where most people walk endlessly around, where the square is the world, where the buildings are made of cutout cardboard and the cafe feels on edge. In the afternoon the gray people walk their gray walk in a slow hurry to the other side; i felt that place within, that sacred place where saints pray and martyrs hide their sins. With every footstep a melody caressed the air in gratitude for the day, the gray day in all its grayness, a seemingly reasonable way, a gray way with all its subdued glory. The cafe expressed itself with a fine aroma. Espresso served in a grey cup. I was there participated like a prince. Herbs hanging on the wall.
In Poland waiting. She says she is near but things feel so distant. Time is slowing down almost still at moments. Her walk slid around a corner appeared disappeared came close then fell apart again. I loved her in the middle of the gray. Her dreams slithered in beside mine and stayed there awhile full of colour before an ocean caught between us ended things.
The square is empty without her, this time is absent now. Her polish is elsewhere. The gray haze of the day continues as if nothing has happened and nothing ever does here in the square gray.
circa 90’s…..a search for love is vain, it finds you or it doesn’t, it didn’t….Wroclaw Poland Square
154 Image-Content of the Day 2018/07/27 of-by https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Man on the streets of Dublin with two different eyes, one looking backwards and one attempting to weave into a future. Just like you and i travelling thru space with one foot on the ground and the other in our dreams. We spend our full live’s orchestrating realities out of thin and thick wind. We think we see what we see even when the weather has shifted. Some catch on quick, some never hear a sound and live in the noice of their minds till there is little or no mind left. There is always enough reason lying around to prove even the most absurd conclusions. People believe what they want to believe, what they are forced to believe, what makes the most sense under the conditions that roof their shelters. We mostly feel the same, we just walk down different roads, roads of love, manufactured and pure, simple and sweet, complicated, discreet.
We exchanged a few pleasant words and looked right into each others eyes. He was weathered and torn, there was no doubt about that, but he didn’t care and neither did i. There was almost a pint of guinness in that nose i thought, and he wore it well as we passed by.
Dublin Ireland in the early 90’s, but it’s been that way forever.
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Truckin Beneath Rocky Skies 341
Early puddle image, mid 70’s.
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Timothy Leary pondering the universe of fragmented dreams
glorious moments demented brains grey angels and alien realities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary
circa late 80’s San Francisco
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Carol Pope https://www.facebook.com/carole.pope.77
circa 80’s
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‘Beautiful Sadness’
You ever have one of those days when you feel like you just want to cry yourself off into oblivion? When it doesn’t matter who loves you, how many good times you’ve had, the promises of paradise awaiting within; you just want to be sad, sad to the end. From childhood to old age those days just happen. There is no cure for a melancholy mind. You don’t have to praise the state, embrace it or avoid it. It has its beauty, its horror, its love. It just is.
‘It is a sad and beautiful world’ as said in the 1986 black-and-white independent film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch and starring Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Roberto Benigni. A great classic.
That is where i heard that phrase for the first time and i see it in Sierra’s eyes so long ago so close to my heart. Not everyone has the fortune of feeling such a feeling to such a depth. Our society prefers to smother reality with ‘happy’ everywhere and avoid this wonderful sad aspect of being human. This avoidance can create worse unnatural conditions leading to dependence on psychiatric substances that in the long run cause much more harm than good. It’s everywhere.
This is an amazing book describing this problem in detail…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_an_Epidemic
Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America is a book by Robert Whitaker published in 2010 by Crown.
In April 2011, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) announced that the book had won its award as the best investigative journalism book of 2010 stating, “this book provides an in-depth exploration of medical studies and science and intersperses compelling anecdotal examples. In the end, Whitaker rejects the conventional wisdom of treatment of mental illness with drugs.”
Sierra was a year or so old here, early 90’s. Taken thru a screen window at a cottage in Algonquin Park, Ontario. She was very sad for some reason staring out at the trees and gray skies. She appeared content with this feeling. I knew this was a great expressive shot when i snapped it and now here it is 25 years later. She’s been gone three years now and i often have a very similar expression when i’m alone inside floating around in memories of her.
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The Harp Angel of Ireland…Mairead Kelly
I first met Mairead while she was playing her harp in the streets of Cork Ireland in the mid 90’s. We became friends, i photographed her husbands band for promo shots, had dinner with the family and one day we wandered along the cliffs near Bally Cotton for an interesting backdrop for some timeless images. We have kept in touch via facebook. Would be lovely to revisit the cliffs today and i suppose i have, if only in my dreams. I spent many moments walking along these cliffs over looking the Emerald Sea towards Wales soothing my melancholy moods. Sometimes when days are tough, one just wants to die into eternity with such dreams.
Mairead encompassed the epitome of the Irish damsel of the cliffs of heather and grasses of the romantic turquoise emerald sea shoreline. Her harp her wings. Her beauty her beauty.
148 Image-Content of the Day 2018/07/21 of-by https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Another Water Colour by Mother Gaia
I am simply a documentary photographer collecting natural impressions produced solely by the water on this earth without any photographic manipulations. A technique that i have been doing now for about 35 years. They never cease to impress me with the billions of possibilities and incredible texture and colour. I have a large collection of trees if i ever get around to sharing them on my site. This is one taken in the last year on the Island of Vancouver here in BC.
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‘Goin to design school..’
circa, 2017 BC
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‘we are falsely validated’
circa, – analog techniques blended from the near-ancient to the post-modern; paint, silver nitrate, electronic impulses; a man, a cigarette, a hat, posed on a validating world.
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A mixture of lit past caught in a realm of space. Time sits quietly in the walls. The story is folding over itself, myths are emanating from the mood, a texture of love is diminishing in the corners, worlds are falling all around, everything is concealed. The statute takes the lead, the dance begins again.
Vern knows..
Circa 90’s….gallery of the infinite….( Vernon Harper )
Image and Writing by patrick wey
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‘behind the walls lie the answers
on the surface the dream
you must pick one or the other
but neither are as they seem’
I have a large collection of graffiti which i have yet to post on my site. I also produced numerous virtual graffiti pieces which are part reality and part my composition created with the help of photoshop with my own images and others to enhance and create a new concept. There is a fascination with graffiti for many reasons. The history spans thousands of years and it has had many applications. Wikipedia elaborates – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti
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A train of thought, soft in the mind
All those things left behind
Things built with tender time
Things rolling on down the line
Some trains are lame, some sane, some from the heart and some from the brain.
The mellow moods one gets pondering over life and its changes when one lets ones thoughts just curve around the bend just like that train does when it rolls past and diminishes into the invisible horizon. Life is so many things, so many judgements, conclusions, so many trains of thought pulling into the station, letting people on, letting people off, befriending, making enemies, holding on, letting go; trains of thought of every hue come and go into the space of the station. Some change stations, some never leave, some move on continuously down the line. A train is a train is a train…some are full, some are empty, some crash, some are at peace but they all leave the station and fade into the long horizon of the great divide someday.
Circa 80’s, model – someone Lindsay Stewart knew, i believe or wanted to know, can’t recall correctly……my train pulled outa that station centuries ago.
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Las Vegas in the Down Side
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Madness on the corner, uncertainty in the street
turmoil in the dream world
where umbrellas try to sleep.
and with all there is, joey’s on the move
classified time left behind in litter bins
truth splattered in the streets.
…..words hardly begun untitled sifted like a scene
can’t determine what’s going on
where you’re going
or where you’ve been…..
circa: america facing forward dragging along phantoms
