peeling

Today was Rutgers Day - apparently well over 50,000 people attended on one campus or another, and certainly the sunshine and the tents and the clusters of red and black balloons made it surprisingly festive.   I taught two mock, or sample, classes on Writing and Photography, and in the first one Danny asked me why black and white photographs are so  much more emotionally evocative and appealing that color ones.   I replied that I didn't think that that was necessarily true - that I, at any rate, like to search for the interesting, the surprising, and the emotionally provocative within the effects of color that turn up in the world.

And yes, I'm particularly drawn to such effects when they occur in the haphazard abstract patterns of peeling and cracked paint and walls: this seaweed green and its attendant lighter patches is to be found on the stairwell of a downtown New Brunswick carpark.   I was descending with Barry Qualls, in full discussion about this blog, and about Rutgers Day, and hence posting an image that I paused to take half way down the stairs is the only logical thing to do.   This particular set of peeling and mending and repainting and generally trying to stave off decay has something of the displaced flower about it, but in general, many of these arbitrary arrangements of disintegrating paintwork are defiantly anti-representational.   So - more corners of the ordinary, to round off a week that's been full of them.