Nr Mravaldzali, Racha, Georgia

"... Here he goes again with the cracked paint, must be cracked himself..."

It happened on the 10-km walk UP (no downhills at all, just UP) from the Oni road to Mravaldzali: Halfway up, in a nearly abandoned village, I came across this fence made of large metal panels. All painted some years ago, and all with perfect cracks covering them. I told Lali that if I had the money and space I'd buy the lot and put them on permanent display somewhere as a monument, the best examples of cracked paint I've seen in my life. I took quite a few shots, and even played with symmetries on all of the results. Here are a few, if you'll indulge me, with the symmetrical version in both cases preceeding the original.

Textures, Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

I was given a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by a friend for Christmas 1992.  It has joined my shortlist of "books to reread for the rest of my life", though I wouldn't say that I agree with all of Mr. Pirsig's conclusions.  One of the exercises he describes giving his  writing students was to detail a wall, starting off with one single brick.  They left the class looking at him with pity or horror as one might a madman, but came back to the next lesson with wonder in their eyes - and torrents of prose on their pages, unstoppable.

Today's images are my own version of this process of looking at details and hardly knowing where to stop once you start.  Not that anything was a great surprise for me as I rediscovered cracked paint and fantascically chaotic rusted sheet metal and window frost in Ushguli, but the delight was new as it is every time.  It is heightened by my having read enough on chaos in natural processes - like the young hero of The Sixth Sense who finally blurts out his terrible secret, "I see dead people", I don't go around (or didn't until now) telling everyone that "I see structure everywhere I look...". Chaos reading, and fractal exploration, have done this to my vision.  I wouldn't change it for the world.  Every tree, cloud, old painted or rotted or rusted surface pulls me in to stare at its patterns, and to try to photograph them if I have the camera with me.  So yes, maybe I'm a bit mad, but typical of such people I'm quite at home in my condition, and even think that others need to see things this way too.  Another thing it does for me is, it convnces me that God IS a geometer; but His geometry is fractal, not simple lines and smooth curves.

Ushguli, July 2007

I certainly was busy during that week in July. Hope no one out there is sick of Ushguli images yet. I definitely am not, but there will be an interlude with other work soon.
The bottom shot in this set is another in my "fascination with cracked paint" series.

Cracked paint, Etseri, August 2004

Just part of a door on the second floor of Nodar's village house. But there's a world of rich detail in such glimpses, if you slow down and notice.

Cracked paint, Etseri, February 2004

For some reason I am strongly drawn to this subject everywhere. Having studied chaos theory somewhat, I think it's the mix of decay-randomness and order. Natural processes impose themselves on an ordered surface and alter it in ways which obey rules but are also partly irregular.