Eight new images are being added to the gallery of the Black and White collection I have been working on for about a year now.

Perhaps I should come up with a real name for the series one of these days.

Like the Tone Poem videos (and soundscape soundtracks) before them, this collection has some “rules” that most, but not quite all, the images play by.

First, they are all black and white and high contrast. ‘Cuz I like black and white and high contrast. I would probably consider doing these on a Xerox machine if I had one.

Second, they are all square. This was chosen because these images were originally meant to serve as a collection to pull new album covers from. For many years now, my acoustic albums have been collages of manipulated images pulled from the Iconographic Encyclopedia. I decided to let that concept go for upcoming covers of EPs and music collections and create something that rhymes better with the covers of the instrumental improvised soundscape EPs. The black and white vs color and the hard, black framing will differentiate the two aspects of my current output.

Third, they are mostly closeup frames and fairly abstract. This isn’t a hard and fast rule (and the first image chosen for Mosby’s Revenge doesn’t really fit this) – but that’s the loose concept.

But this has taken on a life of its own and I quite like this series.

And I quite like how it makes me look closely at small sections of the world and notice the beautiful in the usual.