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Seagull Guano Chaos

By Alex Nodopaka
Photography•Vol. XXX No. 1 (Spring 2017)

In my mid teens I read Worlds in Collision, Ages in Chaos and Earth in Upheaval by Immanuel Velikovsky, and that inspired me a great deal. About the same time, in the mid-1950s, while I already was a pretty good drafting imitator of Disney characters, I laughed at Jackson Pollock’s graffiti. It reminded me of the celestial collisions in that literature. I even imitated his style by finger- spinning paint on cardboard when abstraction was considered state of the art. Later, I discovered cosmic inspiration in seagull guano right at my feet. To me they were divine signs populating the macadam of innumerable parking lots where under each lighting pole lay in miniature replicas of the chaotic constellations. The guano, in their ethereal impacts on the macadam, up close, portray the likeliness of astronomical photographs of the heavens. This series of highly light-contrasted photographs resulted in my personal portrayal of the cosmos.

Alex Nodopaka
Alex Nodopaka speaks San Franciscan, Parisian, Moscowite, Kievlan and more after vodka, when suddenly he starts speaking English. He claims to have been immaculately conceived in Kiev, Ukraine and accidentally offloaded in Vladivostok, Russia. He studied tongue-in-cheek at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Casablanca, Morocco, then subscribed to eternal studentship in the US, where he has been doodling since 1959. His interests in literature and the visual arts are exhaustively multi-cultural.

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