It was the Canada Day weekend of 2010 and I was at my favourite show of the season: Artfest Kingston. I had a large following there and people would come back every year to see my new images and stock up on fine art cards. That year I was particularly excited because I was going to show The Lion and the Lovers for the first time. It was an amazing photo, the kind that makes people stop and look. But for me, it came as an unexpected gift.
Eight months earlier I had been hiking in a place called Horse Thief Butte in the Columbia Hills State Park, part of the Columbia River Gorge area that I love so much. The buttes are full of petroglyphs made by native tribes who’ve been performing their ceremonies there for hundreds of years. I spent the whole morning walking the beautiful semi arid landscape, listening to the wind, and looking for petroglyphs etched into the rocks. I had taken many photos and was heading back out to my car. It was high noon, a time when I usually put my camera away, but as I passed a long stretch of 30-foot-high cliffs, I looked to my right and suddenly, there it was! The face of a lion, as clear as if it had been carved into the rocks. But it hadn’t. It was simply the result of being there at precisely the right time to have the shadows in the natural clefts in the rock create a face. I took several photos before I paused to look again. That’s when I saw the two faces, mouths pressed together, like lovers. As I was taking more shots, from different angles, a hiker walked by and asked what I was photographing. I pointed toward the face but he couldn’t see it at all. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised; I’ve always had this ability to see faces (not always human) in everything…rocks, water, trees, clouds.
I have vivid memories of that first day I hung it in my booth in Kingston. As couples walked by and saw it one would invariably ask the other, “Do you see the lion?” And almost always the other would respond with, ” No, I see two faces!” A psychoanalyst would have had a field day.
At the end of the day, as I was explaining to someone that I’ve always had this ability to see faces, a young man walked by and said, “It’s called paradoelia.” He didn’t even pause to explain, he just kept on walking. I had never heard the word before so that evening I looked it up and learned that it’s the ability to see faces or other meaningful objects in random patterns. It’s not a sign a sign of madness, (whew!) and while not exactly common, neither is it rare.
The next time I was stopped in my tracks by a face was in Lagos, Portugal in 2016. I was on the beach, at the base of the 40-foot high, multi-coloured cliffs that ring the beach. I looked up and in a flash the face emerged: a Tibetan monk with a peaked hat. I’ve often felt that my photos are like post-it-notes-from-my-soul and this one was clearly that. After a week of travelling and photographing, I was heading into a week-long silent retreat with Mooji, a highly respected spiritual teacher living in Portugal. It felt like he was already speaking to me, saying, “It’s time to turn off the camera, close your eyes, and go inside.” I call the image Looking Inward.
The third one is once again from the Columbia River Gorge area. My cousin and I were exploring a number of waterfalls that trip and this one, Fall Creek Falls, was one of the largest. When the water came over the ledge above us it spewed mist everywhere. I sat on some nearby the rocks transfixed by the faces and shapes that kept appearing and disappearing, moment by moment. This is one of those ephemeral faces that I managed to capture before it dissolved. I call it Faces in the Falls.
Lion and Lovers – 12 x 18 canvas, framed with 150-year-old barn wood, originally $325, now $245; Looking Inward – 13 x 19 canvas, framed, originally $325, now $240; Faces in the Falls -17.5 X 22 canvas framed – originally $400, now $240