This image got banned from Instagram.  Twice. 

I’m not entirely sure why, although I suspect someone thinks they can see a nipple somewhere in it.  The horror.  I don’t have a problem with sites setting guidelines on what can and cannot be shown.  They are, in a strict sense, private property and can control whatever message is shown there.  Sites like Facebook and Instagram are businesses and as such they have chosen to try an be all things to the majority of people.  And that is where the problem is.  Art and intellectual discourse are by their very nature subversive and outside the realm of consensus.  Every great idea- impressionism, abstract art, relativity, etc, started out as heresy to an orthodox way of thinking.  I am not so vain as to think my work is on the same level, but if you want to find something new, something that makes you think, the middle of the herd is the wrong place to look.  Social media, in trying to be as inoffensive as possible, sands down the sharp and the rough so everything becomes just OK.  The avant garde is not in the middle!

The upside of getting banned is that I will be posting more of my work here, where I can talk about it in a deeper way.  This image is about tension.  Zara is trying to hold a pose, to find stillness.  Ultimately this is impossible.  We can approximate being still, but every fiber of our being vibrates with energy!  Even without life there is movement.  The mountains appear static and un-moving, but observed over eons they change, shift and move.  Stillness is an illusion.  So why do we try to find it?  I think some of it is our perception of time and what its passing does to us.  If we can slow ourselves, perhaps we can pause time itself, or so the thinking goes.