Highlights from Baren Forum Exchange #75 1/2

I'm rather late posting these highlights of Baren Exchange #75 (I've already also received the prints from #76 - will post those highlights later this week), but they also were delivered late, and big whoop, later is better than never.

I've selected these two to feature first - if I'm  honest - for personal reasons, both sentimental and existential.

Wait, don't I always do that?

I spent a lot of time around children or by myself, and so I'm perpetually hungry for contact with other adults. Not boring small talk, but intelligent or at least juicy conversation. So when I looked at Therese Krupp's Over Coffee... I couldn't help but identify with the figure on the right who seems to just be yap yapping away, while the figure on the left looks ahead, sipping coffee. There's no clear indication of how either of these people feel or what they are discussing. I don't know if the person sipping is all that invested in what she's hearing her companion say or not. It's all just sounds, and a big, red rectangle, and steam rising up from mugs, and the smell of coffee, and this is the wallpaper of one sort of human experience.

So then there's this Still Life - Bananas and Coffee, by Brad Ladwig, and I'm in my kitchen, alone again, staring at this carafe I use every day, this fruit I bought at the grocery store yesterday, and I'll buy another bunch next week, and the week after that, and I'm just utterly struck by this pretty, but lonely, awkward, and incomplete moment, that is so much like many others, and yet it is this moment, right here, now, and never again.