Looking Through

I don't even want to think about the amount of time I spend sitting at a desk, staring at a computer two feet from my face. But once in a while, my eyes beg to focus on something more than an arms length away. I often walk over to a window in the hall just outside the teachers' office and stare off into the distance. There's a hill with a new neighbourhood of houses all built in the last 5 years or so that are just behind where I used to live. The other day I seemed to notice for the first time how many different things I was looking through to look at this far of hillside. There must be five or six "layers" of varying distances that I have to look beyond to enjoy the view. I remember seeing a TV show when I was a kid (that Sunday night Disney show, whatever it was called) and they showed how they made the old Disney cartoons by painting the various parts of a scene on glass plates, arranging them according to location in space and filming through them, thus creating the illusion of depth. Everything I look at here is behind so many layers. It's so different from back home where things are spaced out and often stand alone and are not stacked one on top of the other.


Most of the looking I do in Nagasaki is through, beyond, over, and past something else. There are fences, buildings, trees and most of all electrical wires (which are not buried anywhere in Japan, for some unknown reason). I remember being surprised when I looked at some pictures I took on a trip to Kyoto. I hadn't noticed when I was standing looking at some historic temples that they were hidden behind jumbles of electrical wires. It wasn't until I got the photos developed that I saw every scene was marred with black lines. It's something that's been coming out in my paintings these days. First, rather accidentally but I've been more conscious of it recently.