I realized last night when I was editing this photo of our apple tree in a storm that there was something familiar about my softening the apple tree in the snow.

Kathleen, a friend and blog reader, wrote that she liked the fact that I was seeking new visual worlds. She got it right, I think, although I didn’t know that until she told me.

But it wasn’t until this morning that I pulled up in my head the other images I had seen of artistic interpretations of trees that were presented in this way.

A couple of years ago, Maria and I had a wonderful week in New Mexico.

We especially loved visiting Georgia O’Keefe’s home and studio in Abiquiu. We both love her work, but I fell in love with her paintings of Cottonwood trees, the most beautiful trees I have seen.

I’m not comparing myself to her, but in a sense, she was doing AI visualizations before there were AI visualizations.

In AI (artificial intelligence) they are called “abstractions,” in my mind, they are, as Kathleen suggested, a new and visual way of capturing the feeling of a tree in a storm.

A new visual world.

Digital photography is my form, but I chafe sometimes at the very straight and literal images of modern large frame digital photography. We don’t imagine a different world, we stick close to the one we have.

And I don’t have to go over the top. I like fusing the two forms the literal, or “traditional”, and the new, the “abstraction.”

Sometimes, it’s good to break out of our creative ruts.  I want my readers to be surprised sometimes, I want them to think about what they see, like it or not. I dread stasis, I think it’s the pathway to Old Fartism, a runaway disease among the elderly.

O’Keefe took a cotton tree and softened it, presented it in a new and artistic way. In a sense, and without her brilliant skills, I was doing the same thing.

Our apple tree is a beautiful symbol of the farm. I wanted to see it in a different way as the first wave of the storm eased, and the second one is approaching.

I see abstraction imagery as walking right on the line between a literal digital image and something more on the edge of abstraction. I don’t want to go too far, I don’t want to stand still. So I walk on the line.

I don’t know if O’Keefe’s painting put this but into my head. But a poster of this painting does hang over my chair in the living room. I just find the similarities compelling.

I admire O’Keefe in many ways.

She was not bound by any of the conventional boundaries of art, she experiments and explored and changed the very definition of what art is.

I am not that ambitious, nor am I that talented, but it was exciting for me to see her Cottonwood trees.

If I’d had more color, it could have been even closer.