During the first snowstorm at Anderson Ranch while I was a resident there in November I shot the photos for this piece in Yarrow Park behind the firehouse. This is the only night flash panorama I have done while snow was falling.
My first hike up Snowmass mountain I was startled by the wind, looked up and saw leaves from Aspen trees being blown into the air.
This piece was the first I made while a resident at the Anderson Ranch in Colorado. These leaves were neatly splayed in a single layer near grid in the appropriately named ditch trail.
After two years I finally completed this work. The photos were a circumambulatory portrait of a Sycamore tree that I found in a park in Shanghai, China. I later found that sycamores are native to North America.
For the next ten weeks I will be living and working at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass, Colorado as an Artist in Residence. I feel honored to be chosen for the privilege of working and learning in this gorgeous part of the Rocky Mountains. I hope I can begin by working with Aspen trees in my circumambulatory portrait mode. At the same time I want new work be influenced by the environment I will be living in.
The photograph for the Sawtooth Oak was taken from a tree in the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. The bark is figured to easily suggest its name.
Persimmon is an image of Persimmon tree trunk made from a variation on my hand colored, screen print on ceramic technique. Here I am making a vitreous engobe as my screened media rather than printing, bisque firing and glazing.
This is a vertical panorama from photos taken during the winter of 2011 of the Wentworth-Coolidge Mansion. Standing between the house and the ocean one would typically see the house, then turn 180 degrees to see the view of water and the bridge looking toward the ocean. By combining a series of 20 photos taken while rotating the camera one can see the ocean view (upside down) at the same time as the mansion.
The snow covering most details of landscape around the building accentuates the mansion as out of time and space. The mansion and the objects and space within preserve the historic ambiance of the colonial period. Outside, the context surrounding the mansion is frozen in winter, yielding no clues about the passage of time. A featureless white middle ground separates the historic building from the view of the riverine bay at low tide. This piece is titled “middle ground,” because there isn’t any.
The digital photos that created “Middle Ground” are screen printed with ceramic materials, hand colored, fired in glaze and mounted on wood.
Middle Ground will be in exhibition (artencounterspreservation.org) July 30 through October 15, 2011 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. This is the exhibition statement.
Middle Ground is a ceramic vertical panorama made from photos taken in the deep snow of January this year on the stone wall at the water’s edge. Displayed here in the council room of the Governor Benning Wentworth, the white void of the snow becomes a signifier of the inability of political entities to bridge differences, come together to find common ground and compromise. Governor Benning Wentworth would be forced from office as a loyalist who could find little middle ground with a pre-Revolutionary war constituency unhappy with his corruption and bent on a war of separation from England and its taxes. Tax policies are also responsible for the current lack of middle ground between our two political parties.
OK, Native Corn is not a tree, but it is an inward panorama of a plant just as all the trees in this category. I was not yet ready to create a new category for just one entry. I am working on a pine cone panorama that would give me two entries when it is finished toward another category.
Shiprock is in the East Branch of the Westport River just upstream from the Rt 88 bridge in Westport Point, Massachusetts. You can see our kayaks for transport. A great place for diving, swimming and observing ospreys.