Sorry, good bad Russian joke.
Of course, I do consider myself somewhat of a brooding intellectual living far away from home.
The most important part of this self-portrait is the mug, because I'm drinking chocolate and caramel black tea (Wedding Impérial ). And that is as good as it gets!
This might be one of my favorite temporary "natural" portraits to have made here in the mythical Twin Peaks set amidst the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Having been listening to a lot of Morrie's siren songs as of late, it was only expected that I'd feel inspired enough to get covered in wood ash from head to toe resembling a feral woman and sunburnt, to boot.
In addition to ash and charcoal from the fireplace, I used living and dry flowers and plants, sticks, dead tree buds, glazed tiles, coffee beans (!), and a cross, which lends various kinds of cyclical as well as phoenix-like symbolism. The resultant amalgam was certainly "natural": several creepy crawlers thought it was worth investigating!
Ultimately, every portrait in my ongoing project is "recycled" back into nature. Yet this time around, it was Boreas that aptly cast much of it off the cliff toward the mule deer feeding down below not too long after I finished photographing. I don't pay my assistants enough (wink!).
I was going to mention a shoemaker without shoes--a Russian expression--until I realized that the English equivalent, “The cobbler's wife is the worst shod,” was quite similar (not unlike a number of other languages).
Photographers rarely have decent images of themselves, and those are often self-portraits taken with the use of a timer (at least in my case). Sometimes, there are exceptions, such as this photograph of me.
I suspect that the gods of rock'n'roll had a hand in its creation!