Sunday, January 30, 2011

Silas & Eppie

The beautiful, silent photo blog known as Silas & Eppie resumes activity tomorrow on my birthday, Monday 31 January 2011. This daily pairing of images, with click-through links back to their sources, originated in September 2008 as my daughter's brainchild. She proposed that every weekday morning she should choose an image and I should choose an image from anywhere in the limitless vastness of cyberspace and then post them side by side without any prior idea of what the other person intended. Our mutual early-morning activity thus turned into a sort of two-sided familial Exquisite Corpse game that proved quite sufficiently entertaining for our modest purposes.

Two years later Silas & Eppie went into hiatus at the same time my daughter took leave from her busy career editing art and design books in order to give birth to that glorious being now known as Mabel Watson Payne, and to nurture her at home. Now a new phase begins, and my granddaughter will be spending her days with the daddy – who has saved up the parental leave from his teaching job for just this time. Later still (some while after we all return from the trip to Rome in March) it will be my own inestimable privilege to contribute a month of daytime care. These and other ingenious arrangements will allow my daughter to immerse herself once more in publishing projects while simultaneously mothering the flourishing rosebud-offspring.

Here then let us welcome Silas & Eppie back into palpitating kinetic dailiness. To honor that event, I offer an image-selection of personal favorites from the S&E archive.