Quie-Ted #2

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Awaiting Fall

Leaf It Alone

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I guess someone will eventually remove all of these leaves? Or maybe they will be part of the aesthetic charm come next summer? The kids left everything where they last played with them, and left their summer place. And then the leaf blizzard coated everything before the coming snow blizzards, eh? The circle of life?

Neglected Or Abandoned?

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Was the owner of this boat too lazy to pluck it from the lake? Or does he live year-round and nearby enough to still pull the tarp and use it on occasion? He must have expected the lake to freeze very soon. And there was no bubbler anywhere around the hull of this craft.
Still that tarp was a custom job and expensive. Who knows where #89 would be when winter closed down the mountain. There's something hauntingly lonely about this image. I don't so much get the feeling of neglect as abandonment. You agree?

Appalachian Fall

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Um, well, it wasn't a formal workshop. I mean, like, there was no one there to accept a tuition. And the instructors sort of looked way inside of themselves. But, in fact you can look back over my postings of the past couple of weeks to see what sort of work I managed to get from that shop up at Lake Harmony. All things considered, it was way worth it. At least I think so. Oh, that's my buddy Steve on the poster. Anybody want to sign up for our next workshop? We work cheap.

Complex Simplicity

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It's an odd thing. When I set out to do an image I want to resolve everything inside of the frame. You know how a sixty minute TV drama resolves it all? That's the way I seem to want to work here. So I start looking for my concept within the borders and I pull and poke, pick and peel to let it free. Problem is, it's tough to say, "Hey! That's it Ted. Here, you've told a story of the serenity that can happen even when vivid color's trapped within an impending storm. So STOP!"
But I worry that something can escape my attention that makes the point. So I keep poking and scratching. There's such a compulsion to over work the jewels that digital reveals. So, I stop it at a point where I hope that all the complexities explain a simple idea. And that's it. Of all the endings that could be of this image. This one is it.

Tone Poem

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Composers have tried to mimic nature with tone poems. But, can an image maker mimic, say a concerto? Can I create a pulsating theme that's spirited and pleasant enough for you to sense a solo oboe? A cloud of violins? A vibrant hue of muted horns? Can an image contain both quiet resting places surrounded by lively dancing textures, and within it all a structure that's firm and leading through it its center to some distance spot deep in a piece called Lake Harmony Steps #2?

Or not...

Fuscous

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A dusky, somber moment: what the poet would call "fuscous" - that's what I was after. And I wanted to bag it right at that crack between Autumn's end and Winter's start. All - out fuscous. Fuscousness all around. I wanted my viewer to sense it tumbling from the image.
Oooooo...kaaaay.... so what to do? Howzabout getting up reeeeeely early, on a stormy morning... at a mountain lake that the summer people had abandoned. Howzabout finding just enough color to remind my of what happened here a couple of weeks back, and enough silver/gray to remind me of what will happen a couple of weeks ahead. And do it before the sun bathed everything in golden contrasts. Does that nail it? Do you feel all fuscoused up?

Vatic Color

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I'd never heard the word, "vatic". You? Then, reading something by John Updike... there it sat, like a hole in the sentence. For me it was a drop-out in. You know when you've got someone on a cell, and the.... there's.... a gap? It was like that. Sent me to the dictionary. Ah-hah! So how to use it in an image?
Well at Lake Harmony I stalked the thought through my lens. Hunted the thing down like a predator. Found it dangling from the crook of a tree branch. See here? The color? Vatic's an adjective used in poetry. A vatic guy tells you about future truths. He's a prophet. So - here's vatic color. Reveals future truths, righ?

Rock On

"Magic Realism"... That's what they called the inventions of the great Colombian novelist, Gabriel García Márquez. He wrote stories which seem totally real when suddenly, "PHHHT!" a torrent of flowers pours from the sky... or a rock glides across a pond. Well, here's a rock at Lake Harmony. And here's a pond. Hmmm..... Will the wait be long?.

Deer-Ness

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So a guy says, "Yo, this thing's not a photograph, Ted. I don't know wudda-hell-itiz, but it ain't no photo."

Wrong! If it's not a photograph, um, wudda-hell-izzit? See this image exists. It came from my camera. This deer was standing on the back porch of a mountain cabin up in Lake Harmony. It was chewing on a cracker and staring at me through the back door window. And I took its picture with a wide angle lens - standing that close.

But then I figured, wait. Everybody's got some kinda picture of a deer. I mean how rare are the things? But then I says to myself... "Self, what's a deer? I mean what is the essence of deerness?" Now you may wonder why I talk to me. Passing right by that... I looked to see if I could isolate that deer essence. You know, leave just enough so that if I took anymore away – POOF! –No deer.

And here it is... it shows what deers have, and other things lack. Why... it's... it's... an ontological miracle. Right? Um, oh yeah, and it's still a photograph... I just kind of shoveled stuff off of the photo plane to reveal that cracker eating deer. If you know what I'm saying here?

If It Ain't Baroque

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Suppose you could see radio waves. You would be blind. Ditto if you could see air. But if you could see the the contrasts between light and dark forces that held the smooth and broken surfaces of colors to the shapes all about us... What would you be then? How would you see the world? Would you see the cables that kept everything together? Have you ever noticed, out of the corner of an eye, something just a tad odd. No, not odd, say, out of place?
Imagine you're here, at Lake Harmony and a rising sun's about to explode from last night's storm clouds. And in the dramatic contrast between night and emerging day, for the briefest instant... you sense there are strands, wires, aerial ligaments that tie everything to everything... and then they are gone. Whoa! Crank down the Vivaldi, Dude.

Canon

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In Renaissance music, a canon is a staggered imitation, like the child's song, "Row, Row, Row, Your Boat." I saw the striations in this boat's bottom and found the pattern haunting. See how they repeat, and stagger over one another? This thing went over the same rocks - again, again and again. Or were they rocks? Maybe roots? Maybe some of the other hard mystery things that your feet find beneath the muddy surface of a lake. Whatever...
This wrinkling old buddy aged along with its family, and now it's upended awaiting what? Next summer? The kids who've grown and won't be back? Its aging friends who found it so many years ago and paddled it through memories? It's a soft thing that ground against the glacial rocks of these ancient mountains. Will it get one more round in the canon of its life? Did it win? Are warm memories... winning?

Stumped

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Is there spiritual essence in a stump? Look at that thing, it's probably a lot older than any of us. And it will be there for a couple of hundred years or so, unless someone finds a need to pull it. A century from now the machine saw marks will still look fresh as if they were cast in concrete. Who cut this thing? Why? There are cottages behind me as I took this picture. Did this pine obstruct someone's view? Not enough apparently to finish the job, just enough to get the thing hacked but not low enough to do anything else with this plot of ground.
Yeah, I think there is a spiritual essence to this corpse-that-won't-decompose. Unlike you or I, it's body will survive the snows and the searing suns. And it'll poke itself out of that rocky ground long after its killer's body has bio-degraded. Maybe that's the payback, eh? Maybe that's the essence of the hardy old stump's spirit?

Harmony

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Lake Harmony is in the Pocono Mountains, about 25 miles south of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. It's a place that time forgot. Everything's nicely maintained, or built to feel as if you've driven through a shimmering door into the 1950s. We ate at a restaurant last night, "Shenanigans," where every area is a smoking area! It's as if the post WWII people have been preserved in some kind of patina. Nothing at Lake Harmony's seedy, or ratty, or uncool. And it isn't a museum of any sort. People there seem to have simply decided that they want to live in Eisenhower's America but out in the woods. So they do it with iPods, DVDs, and washer-dryers. The whole place is built around this lake that started to attract summer people in the 1920s as cars got popular.

In Philadelphia back in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, they had a name for the Poconos... During the steamy, city months, they called it, "Air Conditioning". Here's an image from this morning as the sun cracked through a snow spattering sky.