My work is included this month in the National Juried Printmaking and Photography Exhibition at Artspace Gallery. The show was curated by Richard Waller, Executive Director, University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, Virginia. Out of 567 images submitted 56 were selected. The physical show will be up from March 26 to April 18, 2010 and a gallery of the work can be seen online at the Artspace Picasa Gallery.
I have been visiting the lake often in this early Autumn. The season has changed and has scrubbed this magic circle bare of fun-lovers and tourists. The colors are quiet, the birds now own the diving platform and the reeds. The mothers, the strollers, the nature stalkers and the brooding contemplatives are left to themselves to notice what they see.
I have been thinking a lot about the nature of “Photographicness.” The camera’s eye is so irreducibly clear and the screen so translucent. It seems more real than real. And yet when the artifact of this seeing makes its transition unaltered to paper it goes through a metamorphosis. In some ways it seems to die. The more “real” something is the more I recognize it. And the more quickly I look away, as though I “know” what it has to tell me already. So I have been experimenting with subtraction, reduction and what happens when you modify a photographic image through the alchemy of transfer printing. This first image is an image that lives in digital form only. The second one is an archival pigment transfer on Lustro Dull Cover.
I’m thinking today about impermanence, about flight, about how still the skies were in the absence of jets. How crystalline beautiful the days were that Autumn, with a sky razor blue and all the senses alert. This morning I went running on a ridge where I could see the mountains and the bay. Dappled light, birdsong, the marvel of flowers I’d never seen before.
And yet I found myself remembering. Today’s sky was blue, but that other sky is trapped in amber, and I carry it with me.
The light is so brief in the Northwest. I feel panicked to capture it and keep it and put it in a bottle up high in the window where I can see it every day. Transfer print with water color 14 x 20 inches.