Peru Day Seventeen - Looking Forward & Looking Back

So far the creative components of our trip have included assigned readings, blogging, and some "looking exercizes" involving drawing (thanks to Bethany for offering some practical pointers), watercolor, relief printing, and "sun printing" (a blueprint or cyanotype process -- for a mid-19th-century example see the cyanotype by Anna Atkins in the Spencer Museum of Art, 1997.0033).

 

 
Our daily fieldwork and ongoing exposure to new aspects of the rainforest has been all-consuming and often exhausting; therefore we agreed that our primary task while in Peru is to absorb all that we can. The bulk of our individual creative work, and our group project involving K.U. museums, will take form during the summer school session,  upon our return home, so stay tuned for future posts. Some of the potential individual creative projects that we have discussed include a series of short stories, a sculptural rendering of the base of a Cecropia tree, a group of detailed watercolors, and a children's book that would be an ecology primer for use in Peru and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the process of sifting through our hundreds of photographs, notes, and drawings is already serving as a catalyst for this next stage of creative work.

On this, our last day in Peru, I will sign off for now, in deep gratitude for being able to participate in this venture, with a photograph of the rainforest taken from the 60 meter observation tower that overlooks the CICRA/Los Amigos field station (you will have to imagine the sounds of the birds and primates who live in and around the forest canopy).