Black and White and Tints

The Pond at Dusk, 2018, Archival Digital Print

Tinted photographs have appealed to me since I first tried my hand at making them. I was a child in a family with cameras. Our darkroom was on the third floor of the house, a long climb for me. The fresh prints would come into the dining room after a session (sweltering up there in the summer with no air conditioning) and we’d all look them over. My mother, a trained painter, was the prime mover in coloring them. We had a big set of Marshall’s. Those tiny metal tubes were precious jewels in comparison to the standard tube of paint. I applied the tints with Q-Tips and cotton balls.  My touch was awkward and the process required patience for the subtle effect it produced.  Too much for an eight year-old.

The effect still appeals to me.  Using digital media the work is done with the software.  Taken yesterday, the pond in the waning late light of early evening — I write “magical” too much — but it was just that.  This moment needed that haze of green accompanying the black and white underneath.

Thank you, Readers

Wire, Snow, 2018, Archival Digital Print

Thank you, Readers, for your kind emails and comments. You have been most generous. For those of you who have wondered about purchasing my photographs, just email me and we can make arrangements.

Wire, Snow continues my attraction to the minimal which reads like drawing. The winter is the time it is easiest to see these expressions on the land.  To my continuing surprise, every day brings something new to my eyes and senses.  I had set up this crude wire circle to protect the shoots that were starting to peek above the earth.  I wanted to keep the puppies from running over them.  Once the big snow came, it turned into another order of visual surprise.

 

Acuities

Backyard Sheet Music, 2018, Archival Digital Print

There are so many accidental finds in my day.  The acuities I’ve developed here in Columbia County are different from those I learned in my years in Manhattan.  Whom to avoid on the subway is a subtle skill. In an imperceptible glance we sense the stay-aways in a car, and what the general mood is. All of us new arrivals remember the joy we felt entering a car at rush hour and seeing big swaths of empty seats.  A miracle of good luck.  That odor stays in ones nostrils for much of the day.  We didn’t know what that empty space telegraphed.  But, we were fast learners, too.  Walking down a street we learned to sense trouble and differentiate it from excitement.

Now and then I can feel an animal looking at me even though I don’t see it, a gaze zeroing in on me that triggers a primal nerve embedded in my neanderthal self.  Just as when the dogs go out in the morning, they know when an intruder has been nearby — recently it has been Coyotes.  It is part of who we originally were. My Pyr Shep Billy learned the scent of the Black Snake he encountered one afternoon in the driveway in our short stay in Virginia. He was a city boy just relocated to the country.  He never forgot it and sniffs with cautious recognition when serpents are around up here.  These hints of primal knowing make me think of our Native Americans who lived with the land. We must have seemed to them like the tourists on the subway seem to us — unknowing and unaware of the flood of signals around them, the cues of how to live.  For them to be human was to be part of the land not against it, not in battle with it, not eager to steal from it nor unmindful to give back in equal measure. Our out-of-balance natures missed all those signals in our greedy wanting and now we’re in trouble.

I feel lucky for these glimmers.  I feel lucky to live in an area where the Organic Farming movement is already established.  The land does feel different up here.   I cannot describe it, but it startled me the first time I walked on the soil of an organic farm because the earth radiates in a different way.  To experience it is to know it.  Why not send the President up here for a few weeks without his gadgets and Twitter feed, without his hot blonde women and toadyish men, and permit him to sit in the backyard and watch and listen, to follow the arc of the sun and the moon.  It’s a gift he will most likely never have.  He won’t see the backyard sheet music, nor feel the critter’s gaze, nor be surprised by a Black Snake, nor engage the wonder of the planet.  A loss for him and for our home, Mother Earth.

 

Fog and smells

Trees from the Train, 2018, Archival Digital Print

Dense fog has settled over us this morning. It is a misting facial to the land, so damp that droplets form on my skin almost as soon as I go out to feed the birds. The Coyotes are hanging around much closer than last year, and noisy at night. The dogs smell them and growl, then bark, protecting the homestead. When we go out in the morning they immediately find the vile spot that these interlopers marked.  But, me, I am teased by hints of spring and all critters are welcome.

 

Snow Recordings

Highway of Tracks, 2018, Archival Digital Print

On the way to the studio I noticed the collection of tracks going down to the creek. Crossing the road where the light was better, I looked down onto the ice covered creek and there was a highway of tracks, a variety of species and their particular mark of presence running its length. I found a Coyote, a Red Fox, a Rabbit, and other things I didn’t recognize, one, I think may have been a Mink. All this happens as I go about my human concerns and they go about theirs.

 

The Drawing Line

Before the Rain, 2017, Archival Digital Print

Drawing outside yesterday I was marveling at the tools we have created for ourselves from the first human first noticed his capacity to create a line. Now the choice has expanded through so many tools, points, colors and effects but it hasn’t given a line any more meaning or power nor made the Art of Drawing any better. What power can invest a line in one person’s hand and not another’s.