I bought a print an other year of the Camino, the road from France to the Spanish town of Santiago de Compostela. It was in an exhibition series of pictures in our library exploring the nature of roads. Standing on the road; a trail really; was a solitary lengthened shadow of a pilgrim holding a stick: the low sun, the sense of impending twilight, and the antiqued paper giving the print of the road a quality of roughness and endless distance. A road always suggests a journey : leaving somewhere, or something, or someone and going to something or somewhere. But the gist of the journey is the process, not the beginning, nor the end, but where we will spend ourselves. The shadow is fully in contact with the road and accompanies the traveler forward and backward during the day, leading and following and foreshortened side by side.
The road, hard and rough, the traveler footsore: he is confined by the direction of the roadway if he is to progress to his intended target. If it's the road to Zanzibar Dorothy Lamour takes with her friends, or the ´Yellow Brick Road, or the Camino road, the road is where you will spend yourself. This is where we walk a step at a time. In my print the solitary figure expressed by the shadow and the stick gives a feeling to the viewer of the loneliness of the roadway. There is no Bing Crosby or Bob Hope to accompany Dorothy! There is no Toto to accompany the other Dorothy. But of course some of these are only fantasies. Road may signify action not meaning in a world without metaphor.
In my print there is no bicycle, no automobile, just a trail where each step is the only present and the only reality. My print could have been from anywhere because my road is a metaphor for life. I have never taken the road to Santiago de Compostela, marking the way to the Cathedral of St. James, and I am too old to do it now, but a road, is a road, is a road and we are all on a roadway to somewhere and leaving somewhere. It is the process that we live with from the road we decided to take, rather than a goal that will be arrived at somewhere else. Think about it for a minute. How many times did you start with a goal and find during the journey, from your roadway, that the real purpose was somewhere else? And how slow and painful it had to be to get there.
The road, hard and rough, the traveler footsore: he is confined by the direction of the roadway if he is to progress to his intended target. If it's the road to Zanzibar Dorothy Lamour takes with her friends, or the ´Yellow Brick Road, or the Camino road, the road is where you will spend yourself. This is where we walk a step at a time. In my print the solitary figure expressed by the shadow and the stick gives a feeling to the viewer of the loneliness of the roadway. There is no Bing Crosby or Bob Hope to accompany Dorothy! There is no Toto to accompany the other Dorothy. But of course some of these are only fantasies. Road may signify action not meaning in a world without metaphor.
In my print there is no bicycle, no automobile, just a trail where each step is the only present and the only reality. My print could have been from anywhere because my road is a metaphor for life. I have never taken the road to Santiago de Compostela, marking the way to the Cathedral of St. James, and I am too old to do it now, but a road, is a road, is a road and we are all on a roadway to somewhere and leaving somewhere. It is the process that we live with from the road we decided to take, rather than a goal that will be arrived at somewhere else. Think about it for a minute. How many times did you start with a goal and find during the journey, from your roadway, that the real purpose was somewhere else? And how slow and painful it had to be to get there.
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