Second Thoughts About Influences

Inimitable Artists

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention some of my other favorite artists that I've either admired or tried to emulate over the years. One of those would be the great photographer and renaisance man, Gordon Parks.

I remember seeing an exhibition of Parks's photos of leaves on watercolor backgrounds at the Corcoran, and being astounded at the beauty of them. I went home immediately and started trying to create things like that.

And then there's Andy Goldsworthy, who has an amazing relationship with the natural objects that he works with to create sculpture.

The documentary, Rivers and Tides, shows his process, how he attempts to understand nature by building objects, such as walls, or stacks of stones, or even just patterns on the forest floor using leaves.

When I walk through the forest, I want to be able to see the world a little like he does, to understand the nature of water, or rocks or sticks the way he does.

Under the Heading: I Wouldn't Want To Do It Without You

Thanks to DevKick for the jquery plugin to run the galleries. I spent a lot of time looking for the exact right gallery code and the galleria plugin was the only one to successfully integrate with the site design here.

And thanks to the whole jquery development community for making life easier for front-end designers. I appreciate having access to code that is functional across browsers and platforms, and that is easily integrated by tweaking CSS.

I should put in big thank you to Dynamic Drive for supplying the basic three-column and two-column CSS for the site structure as well as the dropdown menu. It's good to know that people work out these issues and then post the solutions. So you take the framework, and the base code, and then customize it and design with it, and it works, even in IE.