Mourning After

Fern Bench

The first freeze finished Fall - overnight. There's a whimpery thing about Autumn:  it lacks a happy ending. Spring triggers hope but Fall-fans know it brings scouring squalls: then flash-frozen rubble of summer memories and wintery worry. Yeah... The  mourning after Fall ends is best framed in black, huh?

GEEK STUFF: Nothing special. A Canon 40D grab shot finished in PS2019 with an assist from Exposure 7 and A.I. Gigapixel (plus a texturizing screen mesh). The grey daybreak result is both morn-full and mournful.

And so another still life filled with obvious purpose. But a feeling of medieval palette?

Summer + Winter - Fall

It's cold outside. 

Summer's green went memory last week and now? Winter stalks don't know they're dead when only last week sun made air green. Summer's a memory, even in summer. But winter's real... hard as a grant tablet. Even in summer, winter's hard. 

Y'know?

GEEK STUFF: That stalk shivered in front of my Canon 7D MkII. It was the day before night flash froze it. And this technique is new to me. I've rendered the image almost entirely with brushes in PSCC in an attempt to place each feeling. 

Flower pictures are hard to understand. It's so hard for an artist to deal with their form, color, line, texture... So hard to let them say anything more than the immensity of what they come to us with. Only the greatest artists can speak through flowers... can find in them a metaphorical doorway to something else. Not something more necessarily, but something other than what they scream into our brains through our eyes. 

Flowers are loud. Thoughts and feelings are subtle. It's easier to change a blinding klieg light than it is to change, bend, influence... the meaning of a flower. Flowers mute the artist.

You ever done a picture-perfect image of a flower? Shown it to someone? Hear them murmur, "How pretty. You are a good photographer." And if you've rendered it in all of its beauty, well you are a good photographer. But if all that an audience sees and feels is flower... You are not an artist. 

Art without wonder is merely craft. Flowers prove that more forcefully than any other subject except... except for babies, dogs, and Hustler centerfolds. 

Summer Meat

Backyard city bloom • Late Summer 2015

Look at this fella. Then go find a slab of raw steak. Heft them in your mind. Squeeze their bulk. Okay, the steak'll drip something, this thing probably won't. Probably.

Here's a man's flower. Muscular, burley, fisty.... Nothing delicate here. Smash this into some face and it'll welt, huh? This'd damage a butcher's scale.

I like that. A flower that a hammer might not damage... Easily.

It's a guy thing.

Christmas Colored - Happy 2014

Once upon a time... it was December 12th and A Longwood Christmas 2014 was underway when Rita and I joined Marty and Gib Armstrong for the 45 minute ride down to Kennet Square in Chester County. Some of you don’t know about these 1,077 acres of gardens, woodlands and meadows where the Dupont Family (Yes, that duPont family) created what might be the world’s premier botanical gardens in Brandywine Creek Valley. 

A disclaimer: While I’ll glue some images together with a narrative in this post, it’s a hard fact that discussing the mystery of flowers is more difficult than describing the shape of mist. I find that the stuff of Longwood Gardens goes through my mind directly to my feelings without ever passing through words. 

 Maybe three or four times a year we try to visit Longwood Gardens. Their Christmas display is a magical explosion of color that’s a magnet to a fine art photographer’s lens. Floral inspiration comes from plagiarizing what nature’s created. So  in a effort to  find my voice this year, I decided not to just take photographic dictation from the flowers. But still, for those who either missed it this time, or for you folks way far away from here, all around the world… well I’ve attempted to let the show communicate the idea of Christmas Colored. Make sense?

REMEMBER SPRING?

Within their glass bubble, the curators of Longwood have stuffed a dense luxury of star dust… Their trails contradict the wintry outside ice to trigger feelings of seasons past or coming. They do it with polychrome sparks along trails leading off into humid tropics, arid desert, and among lushly weird exotica from every continent and most islands. 

DETAILING

So this Christmas, instead of trying to document their enormous show I hunted just for the accessories which set off the elusive feeling of A Christmas Colored. You know: examine trees instead of forrest? Like this tiny glass bird nestled maybe ten or twelve feet up there among vines hugging a strange tree? Is that breadfruit? And does this shiny little guy evoke a fragment of lost holidays you captured somewhere a long time back?

The photographer Brooks Jensen’s written, “Picturing flowers is too easy, like clubbing baby seals.” But capturing their conclusions… now that’s a challenge. So that’s what I hunted in those four and half acres of heated greenhouses joined together by lush corridors of plants and meandering brooks burbling with ebony water. On a near bank I found a Scotch pine hung with lights and snowballs while on the far bank a giant palm was back-lit with orange-golden spots. Do photographs lie? Is there such a thing as non-fiction in any media? What images do is reflect the photographer’s life-view. The more interesting question is whether there is a gap between their creator’s narrative and reality. 

A sign announced that there are over 5,500 plants in the 20 indoor Longwood gardens cut with half a mile of trails. They’ve begun a forty-year expansion overseen by the Dutch landscape architecture and urban planning firm, West 8. And already the efforts have won international awards… Including one for this…

WASTING AWAY

There was a cheery docent at the main entrance. “Down there’s an award winner," she pointed us to a corridor that led to this row of doorways. Want to guess what’s behind them? These are toilets! Uh-huh. They look like mausoleum doors, don’t you think? And for what is that a metaphor? But who knows what Dutch WCs look like? Um, wait a minute, I was in Holland recently. Didn’t see anything like this though. Hmmm… Maybe I spent too much time wandering their notorious Red Light District?

ON TO THE MANSION

In 1906 Pierre du Pont, the industrialist, bought this property as his private estate and today his mansion which is also part of the Longwood Gardens Foundation sits about a hundred yards from the sprawling crystal greenhouse. Also open to the public, that home’s built around a two story atrium where this graceful wreath whispers its early 20th century message of holiday elegance. Have you ever noticed that simplicity is elegance and vice-versa.

Has it occurred to you how short, “now” has become? We seem to have no time for it. Now seems to be what’s keeping us from something. Now’s an impediment. The du Pont mansion’s interior details  speak of a time before 24/7 news cycles, streaming video, audio, and games. Everyone at the du Pont dinner table shared the same culture-space. There were no virtual guests competing for attention from hand-helds. Its interior details lent themselves to the muted color-capturing-nostalgia of watercolors. 

Upon du Pont’s death in 1954 he left much of his estate to support the Longwood Foundation which manages the gardens that  are open to the public seven days a week. And more importantly he left us the opportunity to look at the luxury of his day.We can look at what maybe never was… And I guess that’s what nostalgia is, huh? A look at what never happened, but should have? 

Still, it’s moving, particularly at Christmas, to imagine living when families ate together each evening. And more importantly knew enough about one another to share and communicate in their “now” which has become the “when” or “then” of the nostalgia that perhaps happened: Once upon a time...

HERE'S THE 12/12/14 GROUP SHOT

Above: That friendly docent who pointed us to the prize-winning bathrooms saw my camera and volunteered to picture us in front of the grand hall where this all starts and ends. It takes about 90 minutes to walk the trails and visit the nearby du Pont mansion. That’s Gib and Marty to the left of Rita and me. Do we look hungry? The Armstrongs drove us back to Frank Fox’s Aussie And The Fox restaurant in downtown Lancaster. Which is where we discovered that, yep… We were famished.

Oh… a last capture. Among the Longwood Collection is a group of Bonsai miniature plants. In the display’s center is this pomegranate girl. “Ewww,” a woman muttered next to me. “I thought my baby was big! Now that…  THAT’s what I call labor !!”

4th of July '12: Moods

Don't know where I want to go with this... First I thought, "Why not show this girl like... well, here?

But then she seemed happier, like this.

.. So.... Wuddaya think? Low key? High key? You got any key preferences?

See, the deal is, I'm diddling with mood. It's astonishing how the key... the chord... changes feeling, eh? So musical. Right?

Took this out in the garden in the early morning light with my Canon 7D. Used the Canon 17-85 EFS zoom lens and manually focused close up in its macro mode. But the fun came in processing. See, I walked out front onto the Lancaster City street and grabbed a way-out-of-focus shot down the sidewalk through the tree canopy toward the oncoming traffic which now switches on headlights in daytime.

Okay... I used that street scene as a filter layer... see the bokeh in blue? Those are the auto lights. Right... Topaz's Adjustment let me play with various strengthening effects, and I masked them in at key spots to emphasize different textures and shadowings. Of course I adjusted the dynamic range throughout thanks to the latitude which RAW images allow. AlienSkin's Exposure 4 came next... and again, I employed a bunch of different adjustments on different PS4 layers, masking them into the various crags and crooks of the flower's body. Finally a curves adjustment layer let me paint in shadowy depth.

Of course the process varied in each of these images so that in the first image low key could be explored and high key emphasized in the other. Even though I'd intended to conceptualize the extremes of mood, it's still wonderful to discover so many unexpected alternatives during the processing.

In fact, there's no such thing anymore as "post-processing" from the moment of conception, through collecting images, into the computer exploration... it is now all just "processing". How many tools we've got as visual artists today! What a wonderful time, huh?

A REAL Photograph?

Click On The Image

It’s called by some
The Simple Life
What the Amish have.

On a Summer day
Riding Lancaster’s
Backroad farmland hills

I wonder if simple
Captures what it means
To live here like this?

Hmmm… Some have wondered if I still take “pictures”? I’m guessing they mean, photographs? In fact friends wonder if I can still take pictures? Okay… here are the basics, right? It looks like a picture, a photo… um… don’t you think? Of course, nothing is reeeeely as it looks, is it? :-)

Near Blue Ball, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
Canon G10, PS4 (pano w/image merge 4 wide-angle pans), custom brushes

NOTE Okay... maybe I did move the barn, um, into the image, uh, along with its cow and pasture. But... but.. it's still a picture, right? And well, perhaps there were only a few of those orange flowers snapping open, but.. but.. well, there should have been more, huh? And yeah, the skyline could have been messed up with a few inconvenient buildings off in the distance. Well who has an appetitie for inconvenience anyway? Not me... nope. But... but... except for those tiny details and a tad of romanticizing the dynamic range and color palette... HEY... basically it's a photograph, huh?

Over There: See?

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Brambles always return. We are only so far in front of life’s jungle. But as long as we’ve got the energy and tenacity to keep ahead of the suckers…. To whack ‘em off when they’re little more than scratchy stubble – Well, it is as if civilization’s here to stay. But it takes a bunch of individual effort – an every-day-thing.

Because the jungle’s really just below ground, and sometimes – even in the middle of a city its fingery brambles claw back through like… like…

Over there: See?

What To Call 1 & 1/4?

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I'm hearing a lot about diptychs. This is their big fashion moment. But I didn't have a diptych... just a dip and a quarter. Or is that a one and a quarter tych?

Well anyway... there's a thing about winter. It's always pushed into the city by a big storm. On one side of the thing it's fall, and winter on the other. A couple of days ago was on the other side of the storm. Then it got things wet, cold, and brrrrrr....

GEEK STUFF

7D through the Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens. Sweet bokeh, huh? And then? Well I cranked it up with AlienSkin's Bokeh and SnapArt colored pencil. Simple....

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A Hindu friend once explained dars´san to me. "I go to temple not to worship Ted, but rather for dar´san. – to see divinity. Dar´san can be taken or given Ted. It is a blessing that comes from the sacred."

Okay, now I do not have my head around that concept. But I'm wondering if it has something to do with why our lenses are tugged toward objects like this? Is there an instinctual compulsion for dar´san? What do you think... does this give dar´san? Or is a rose by any other name just a rose?

GEEK STUFF
In the backyard with my Canon 40D: Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) in macro mode. Post: PS4, Topaz, Alien Skin: Bokeh & SnapArt - Water color, custom brushes & textures

Flowers Are Boooring?

SIMPLY PRETTY

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The thing about flowers is that… Well you know what a “gimmee” is in golf? They are given free to us as artists. They are so beautiful… almost achingly so, that it is as if we are cheating by making images of them. They are both simple and pretty… “Simply Pretty”.

And they are so difficult at the same time. I have a similar problem with gorgeous people. Their very perfection leaves me so little artistic room to maneuver. How do I add anything to the stunning presence of those flowers up above? What is left for my artistic muse? I become a reproducer… a copier…. a…a… a… plagiarist.

If I took something like that in my day job… and reproduced it in an article… I’d get sued for appropriating the idea/work of someone else. And yet… yet…

Haven’t you noticed that there are things which are like magnets to our lenses? Trains pull at our cameras along with sun sets/rises, children… and… and.. FLOWERS!

So of course I can’t help myself. But when they are done… and the image sits there smiling back… So simple… so pretty… So Simply Pretty… I want to share it, but not take credit for it. Because what I see there is something for which I have very little credit. What I see there is awesome, moving, and some higher source’s gimmee.

BTW, there are artists who can express their personal wonder through their floral still lifes. I think of April Siegfried's stunning studio studies. Hers are NOT merely slavish reproductions. Not boooooring. See, it's not so much flowers that I find booooring. Or images of them... It is the fact that I lack the imagination to do more than reproduce nature's gimmee.

Sigh…

Blossom Time

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Drove down to the Capitol last Tuesday. Cherry blossoms and tax day - both come in April. Pretty day last week... next week comes April 15th and the death of Washington's blossoms.

Bowers then showers.

Just More Flowers

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I won’t send flowers
They’re too easy
And yet flowers
Are too difficult


So I won’t…
Except once or
Four times
Each year…
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Pre processing in my Lancaster back yard this weekend through my 40D with its Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) screwed on. Aperture priority of course with the thing opened full to squeeze the depth out of the field. And Post processing? Well I hunted for the personality of these girls in CS4 with AlienSkin’s SnapArt tuned to play the music.
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Click here to see....
See… Back in late March I posted the first in this series of my manly attempt to picture girly flowers. Sigh… No matter how I try, they come out hard and muscular. Flowers are about nuance… but I’m not certain a man quite gets that… Which makes flowers for the guy artist simultaneously too easy… and too difficult. Well, there’s always Fall, eh?
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Just Flowers

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Longwood Gardens is about forty miles from my home in Lancaster. It's in Bucks County not far from the Brandywine Museum we visit frequently. A legacy of the Dupont Family the gardens sprawl both outside and inside. Last week we stopped by and while the March air was still frigid... well, the arboretum encapsulated what's just about to happen outside the house here in Lancaster.

I don't do flower pictures. If you scroll down to the keywords below this post you'll see "Flowers" and if you click there, well I don't think, of all the images on this blog, that more than about five are actual flowers. There are two reasons I don't do flowers..... (1) they are too damned easy. I mean after all you aim the lens click the shutter and there's a flower picture. And usually it's colorful and all that but (2) They are too damned hard. It continually amazes me to see terrific artists who make flower images that resonate with a new intensity. My flowers are so... so... booooring. They simply don't ROCK!

But still, when I roam through Longwood gardens it's as if my camera fires by itself. And I come away with discs crammed with bazillions of boooooring flower images. There's probably some secret to it. Sigh... But nobody's ever told it to me.

Anywayzzzzz.... just as I only posted one Fall picture last year... here's my one spring flower thingeee.... Suggestions?

The Artist

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Regardless of what art is... there's another question: Why do people do art?

Hmmmm.... I've got three reasons:

(1) They have an instinct to gather parts of life for themselves or,
(2) They want to save parts of themselves for the future or,
(3) They want to stuff a market in a bottle cast into the tides of time...

You want to add more?

Brandywine Mist

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Andrew Wyeth died this week. We were there again... at his place... the Brandywine Museum, a month or so back. We go there often. The river is really a creek, a wide one though. And it overflows into the museum a lot. The permanent collection of the Wyeths' is all on the upper floors. Oh, it's quite nice. So is Chester County. And thinking about Mr. Wyeth, I thought of those mists that tailed around your ankles and the benches and ferns. Ghosts from the Brandywine, and great people who lived nearby.

What's The Story With Flowers?

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Have they anything to offer but beauty? Must you justify them because of their prettiness? They share a force with babies, puppies, and kittens which squeezes an, “Awwww!” out of us. Now I can understand our hard wiring to young mammals, evolution’s hooked that up for obvious reasons. But why to flowers? What primal instinct is served by us feeling so much from blossoms?

They rarely signal the presence of food. Nor water. They’re lousy shelter. They’re never warm in the cold, hell, they’re not around then. And since the most colorful thrive on direct sunlight, they don’t advertise relief from heat. So if it’s not survival or sustenance, what’s the deal?

Let’s go back to the baby thing. We’re drawn to the big eyes and helpless movements in an instinct to hold and protect. And their memories certainty are one motivation for procreation. Hmmmm…. Are flowers wrapped up in our protective or procreative instincts? Certainly Georgia O’Keefe discovered Freudian metaphors in blooms for – well you know where I’m going… Or where she went.

Oddly though, flowers seem to appeal even more strongly to women than to men. Perhaps it’s cultural, but in most societies, aren’t flowers a coveted gift by men to women? I suspect there is some gender correlation to the intensity of their appeal.

Regardless, I have taken flower pictures, hasn’t everyone? And each time that I do, the best of the shoot seem to resonate among the better images I’ve captured. Until I wonder about them. Yes there are all the classical elements of texture, form, shape, and palette. And they can be easily framed in any of the most powerful compositions.

But once you’ve done that, what have you captured? April has found ways to speak eloquently through her flowers. I cannot find that voice. But what do I get? A pretty flower picture, like the ones that come with new picture frames. Beauty does not resonate, it merely attracts. We use it up quickly - it is monotonous.

Perhaps the problem with pictures of blooms is that they do not die. They do not wiggle, sway, or glottal together to create new patterns. Perhaps it is the persistence of photos which may distill out the beauty of the original flower, but not its impermanence . Perhaps it’s the fragility that they share with babies, puppies, and kittens that make the real things more interesting than their photo representations?

I want an image to bring me beyond itself. I cannot find those stories in my flower pictures. Nor can I find the feelings that are larger than the blossoms. Which probably leads to my disappointment with my images since I can’t seem to visually answer the question: What’s the story with flowers?

For Miss Natalie

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Long ago Mr. Jones sent her to Miss Natalie.

Then never called again.

For decades Miss Natalie groomed her...

And since Miss Natalie's death, I've fed her there in the window's gusty light...

Awaiting Mr. Jones.

She keeps her faithful watch, perhaps for each of them?

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And here's the virgin image...

DAY THREE: Computo Reviso

Sigh... Spent lots of last night reading a book on .Mac and getting fuzzy headed. Why was I reading it? Well aside from getting a rush from being fuzzy headed, the new machine and my current .Mac settings appeared incompatible. So I now know lots of things about .Mac that I will never need again, but that part of my repair and reload is finished but more remain. I hope that by the weekend this will all end and that this new MacBookPro will be vastly more efficient for me than the old one. However... once again I have not had enough brain power left to focus upon my image making.

Sorry... Hope that by Saturday... hope hope hope... I shall yet again feel and be graphically creative.

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Did you ever wander around in a florist shop at the very end of Valentine's Day? Just before closing when the setting sun bathed the remaining corpses?

Lightenment

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As many of you know, Rita and I are off to Rome then Florence for two weeks on Sunday. Just spoke to the house sitters (who will live in and dog sit my buddy Rocco).

So since we're visiting the epicenter of the enlightenment, I decided to look at this evening's first sunrise of Fall as an attempt to try to outrageously mix the emotional content with the Greco-Roman aesthetics of proportoin, balance,poise, and simplicity. The enlightenment was characterized by formalists who bristled at non-conformity, experimental techniques, and unpredictability. So...how to capture that within a block of my home?

Here's a neighbor's stoop on East Chestnut Street. So? Is there a mastery of form here? Is this sufficiently lyrical to at least qualify me for a visit to places still moist from the Age of Reason? Enough expressive texture? Tone?

Okay... not a masterpiece, but I'm trying to get in the mood for Europe. Mood... yeah... Gotta work on capturing mood this week.

Tacky?

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Recently a magazine needed to illustrate a story on "Tacky Motel Art". So of course, the editor turned to me. The article was about that sort of painting you find in the "Starving Artist Sales" which bloom all around the United States. At these things you poke through hundreds and hundreds of "real art" painted by "real artists" done in "genuine paint" on "real canvas". Frankly I don't know where they do get the - mosty unsigned - stuff they sell for $19.98 - about a third of the price of the frames they peddle.

BTW... have you noticed that the real money in the art biz is in framing? But I digress

Anywayzzz.... I took a picture of Rita's flowers in the back yard. I brought the image up in PhotoShop, grabbed the smudge tool and with different brushes swirled the colors around for a couple of minutes and... WHEEEEEEE! Here's what I filed, and what they printed.

So, wuddaya think? Will it sell at a "Starving Artists Sale"?