September

September is a transition month for me. My daughter starts school which changes my routine to something more regular, and I work feverishly to prepare for an intense fall show schedule. I’ll likely have eight shows just within October and November. September is also a time to get away and do some image making – say North Carolina.

Having my daughter at school during the day means I know where I have to be and when, and can establish a regular schedule to get done what I need to do. It also means I need to be disciplined enough to get everything in. It goes something like this:

6:30am – wake, make coffee, feed cats, read/ 7:30am – get Hannah awake, make breakfast, get her on bus, talk with neighbor at bus stop/ 9:00am start work (various tasks)/ 12:00pm -Lunch/ 1:00pm - more work/ 2:30pm – weight training (must keep in shape for shows, heavy boxes)/ 3:30pm – misc. non-work tasks/ 4:00pm – coffee and good magazine/ 4:45pm – back to work till dinner/ after dinner – work till too tired. That is a five-day a week schedule for non-show weeks. Weekends are for shows, image making, lawn mowing, family stuff.

It’s all pretty regular unless some unforeseen event throws it off. I don’t mind it a bit.

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Drawing to See

I could draw pretty well as a kid because my mother who is an artist taught me the fundamentals. At that time, I thought it was just neat, fun, a kind of trick. In grade school we were told to draw what we saw in a microscope. Later in my studies as a biology major in college, I understood that drawing was a way to enhance our powers of observation. If you could draw the thing, you were more likely to understand it and remember it. As a visual person, I discovered how right that was.

The elements that make up a drawing – line, value, shape, texture, perspective, are the same elements that I put into my photography. For me, photography is my way of drawing, of seeing, and understanding a subject in a way I would not likely see it otherwise. There are other elements to the photographs I try to create. Elements like design, light, color, selective focus, selective depth, and even movement. Put together, these elements make up the way I see something and has changed the way I see almost everything.

Landscapes are not just places that I put labels on such as field, Kempton, Pennsylvania. They become reduced to elements like the ones above, which allow me to see the landscape and appreciate it in a way that only drawing it, painting it, or photographing it would do for me. It is a way of seeing that permeates all of my life and which I am grateful for. The only thing is, its got to be turned down a bit when I drive!

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Gallery White

My wife and I are trying to pick paint colors for our kitchen/family room. We like color, so white is not an option. Looking at the paint charts and thinking about this weekend’s show in the Poconos, reminds me why I have chosen to use a neutral color mat with my own prints.

Color is just too personal and too complicated a decision to try to get it right for any particular client. Two things in particular confirm for me my mat color choice. First, I like the Gallery White mat with most of my work because I like color in my work. I don’t want to compete with my prints by using a colorful mat. Second, I do think the frame choice can emphasize some color within the print and a colorful mat would only make frame choice more difficult.

Even the naming of mat colors (care of Crescent), and paint colors for that matter, is difficult. I choose Gallery White (great name for art anyway right?), but I could have chosen Bright White, Script White, Antique White, Moonlight, Alabaster, Palm Beach White, Very White, or Off White (their all off if you ask me). If I wanted to actually use a color, it gets worse.

Lets just look at greens for a moment as they would seem to work well with much of my imagery. I could choose from Micro Mint, Clearwater, Celery Seed, Serengeti, Gecki, Amazon, or my favorite – Grecian Olive!

How about some warmer tones? Here’s some good ones: Sunset Clay, French Jonquil, Naples Yellow, Napa Wine, Tandoori. I’ve never been to Naples, and I don’t know what a Jonquil or a Tandoori is. But I do like the names Really Red and True Red – sounds like a fight between two mat-color naming geeks.

It almost makes any discussion about mat color with a client impossible. Unless maybe if they ask for an inner mat of Really Red and an outer mat of Very White.

Paint chip names are even worse than mat color names. Here’s just a few from our Behr list that seemingly have no color meaning - Calming Retreat, Fall Mood, Day Spa, Nurture, Decadence, Comforting, Tranquil Retreat (different from Calming Retreat?), Quiet Moment, Refreshed, and my favorite – Wisdom!!. Frankly, I don’t see any wisdom in these naming games.

So if it were up to me, I think our Kitchen/Family room would be a multi-colored Retreat (both Calming and Tranquil), with a bit of Quiet Moment, Refreshed and yet with Decadence. Lastly, I would have to add to the kitchen area – Iced Expresso or Swiss Coffee. Maybe strips will work.

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Pocono State Craft Festival – This Weekend

Held this weekend (Aug. 25-26) at the Sun Mountain Recreation Club at Shawnee on Delaware, this outdoor show is attended eagerly for its quality selection of fine craft and artworks. The setting is both attractive and peaceful for a nice getaway day trip. This will be my second year exhibiting with this group and I’m looking forward to nice weather and strong attendance.

Here’s a link for their web page – http://www.poconocrafts.com/

I’m continuing to prepare for this show while also looking ahead to my October and November schedule. I’ll be expecting to add a couple more shows to this already full calendar.

In an outing last week at a favorite location of mine, I was pleased to find two osprey interacting. Possibly a mated pair migrating through the area, they made some wonderful acrobatic flights. This image I decided to print as an 8×10″ (matted and mounted to 11×14″), will be at the show this weekend.

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Since 1839

That seems to be the accepted date for the invention of photography – 1839. I’m amazed by the history of this medium, as relatively short as it is. The impact it has had on the art world has been profound. Photography has been condemned and heralded as both the ruin of art and its savior. That doesn’t even take into account the debate among photographers since 1839 as to what photography is or should be. It’s great reading!

The book that has got me highlighting, and scribbling in the margins is by Aaron Scharf entitled Art and Photography (Penguin Books, 1974). This is a book that I’ve been working at for some time as it’s slow reading. I keep re-reading passages and making written comments to myself on the pages. It’s the book I took with me this past weekend and it helps me think about the medium in new ways ( and old ways as well if I’m reading the book correctly).

This is another of the images I made during our respite at the Poconos.

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Rested and Revitalized

Sometimes getting away doesn’t have to be for long or too far away. My wife, daughter and I spent the weekend at a friends house in the Poconos here in PA. We had the place to ourselves for a couple days to just relax and rejuvenate. This was our second year doing so in the Month of August. Mostly we read, relax on the deck which backs up to a state forest, and watch some movies. It also gives me a chance to do some relaxed photography right out the door on the house grounds.

Mostly what is there are ferns, dried up leaves from previous year’s leaf fall, and some big rocks. This year we also had a bit of rain. Visually, I find this a rather sparse scene and yet very magical if I can find a streak of creativity within myself.

The rain added the visual element that really spurred me on to work differently, see differently, and use some previous experiences to make some imagery that’s go me pretty excited. The ingredients were simple enough. Start with a big rock, add rain water, a leaf, overcast light and some personal vision. Angles that I worked were steep and contorted, so I worked without a tripod. I could see the way the light was playing through the viewfinder which confirmed for me the results I was after.

I don’t know what will come of the work, but I am digging it for now.

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New Work – Part IV

Continuing in the “close to home” vane of my new work, this piece was also made in our garden. An oxeye daisy served as inspiration for an image that maybe is less about the flower and more about a sense of touch. The image is composed to place the yellow center of one daisy at the bottom and the petals (fingers) of another at the top. The use of selective focus and minimal depth-of-field create a sense of the sun at the bottom of the frame and the petals almost reaching toward it. Or maybe it makes you feel entirely differently?

It will be offered initially as a 5×7″ print matted and mounted to 11×14″ for $28.00 in an acid-free clear sleeve.

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New Work – Part III

Here’s a piece that I will be offering as an 8×10″ print matted and mounted to 11×14″. It is an abstract rendering from a Day Lilly my wife has grown in our garden. I wanted to emphasize the curvature of the sigment I discovered within the flower, almost like a wave. It is a monochromatic piece in the sense that it is all of a golden-yellow color. Soft light allows for a very clean presentation with just enough depth to visualize the “wave”. This is also an image I could visualize being printed larger and enhancing its abstract nature.

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More New Work

I’m adding this piece to my small print selection (5×7″ prints matted and mounted to 11×14″). These are tulips that my wife Donna grew. I found myself drawn to the clean whites and made the image so that the background was also clean. I enjoy working with white which I think enhances the delicate nature of these tulips. These are sensual flowers and so I wanted the composition to express that through the curvature of the stems. I made sure to work during the soft light of dusk so that I would not have any hot spots or shadows.

The more I work with tulips the more I find that they lend themselves to expressing much of what excites me visually.

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New Work for the Poconos

My next up and coming show is the Pocono State Craft Show at Shawnee-on-Delaware (August 25-26). This outdoor show is set in an attractive tree-shaded outdoor venue. I exhibited at this show for the first time last year and despite heavy rain on Sunday, the crowd was dedicated and appreciative of the work they saw.

I will be offering a few new pieces at this show. I typically work on printing new work during the off winter months, but try to prepare a few new pieces during my mostly free August and September period.

The image below will be offered as a 5×7″ print matted and mounted to 11×14″ for only $28.00 in an acid-free clear sleeve. It is of course an image of an American Goldfinch in it’s summer attire resting on a branch with fully green foliage. It represents the kind of contrast in colors, and expressive posture that I strive for in my bird imagery. The feather, and beak, detail is great while focus remains strongly on the Goldfinch’s eyes (which surprises me somewhat as I manually focused this image).

These little guys are always a joy to see and I enjoy their song as well. Their undulating flight pattern though makes me glad I don’t have to fly with them. The image was made with a Canon EF 500mm f4.0 lens and Canon 1.4X teleconverter on a Canon EOS 1D Mark II. I worked with the lens wide open at ISO 400.

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