Discover.
After a Spring with gallery openings in Yosemite and Carmel, travel on trains, cars and planes from Seattle to Chicago to New Orleans. From standing in the spray of Yosemite Falls, to standing in the original Apollo Mission Control in Houston to walking the swamps of southern Louisiana to meeting the youngest Freedom Rider in Mississippi and celebrating my sisters 40th birthday in Portland, the travels of the past few months have been eclectic if not profoundly enlightening. And as the summer marches on I prepare once again to venture up into the High Sierra Mountains of California, stepping off on August 18th.
If you know me, or have read past Stillness Issues, you know that I’m slightly obsessed with the Sierra and venture here a lot, and it’s true. It’s good to have a place that feels both comforting and inspiring, a place where elation and fear can be experienced at the same time. A place to be nomadic for a time and where the great precipices of life are most keenly felt, a place to experience the thou of living. Where is that place for you, have you found it?
That humans are social animals is not refuted. But what social animal doesn’t need at times to disappear with themself, to go out into the wilderness to find the good healthy air. “…you do not ask a tame seagull why it needs to disappear from time to time toward the open sea. It goes.” Bernard Moitessier should know, when he wrote that in 1968 at the outset of sailing solo nonstop around world. Art is a metaphysical sense, a way to explore the world through interpretation, the physical combination of all the senses attuned to whatever it is that’s being portrayed. And so I go, as all who feel such longing must go.
For this project I designed a route of several hundred miles, looping the heart of the southern High Sierra, and will spend three weeks alone in that wilderness to walk, write and make art. In a lot of ways I have more invested; financially, creatively, physically and emotionally in this journey than previous journey’s into these mountains. From a new camera system I’ve wanted for most my career to months of physical training and preparation, to uncertainty around the creative why.
Because of these complexities, I’m calling this project Discover. Because discovery is never complete, and being a landscape artist that means the repeated exploration of self and the landscape. We need to give ourselves time for this discovery. To let the ideas have the space to ferment and grow. Projects helps to solidify and clarify what that exploration can look like. This organization lays the foundation for the artistic journey that follows. Whatever that journey becomes.
I’ve designed this project to give me more time to photograph with less walking and more time exploring little visited areas. I’ve constrained my tools by taking only a single, highly specialized film camera called a Hasselblad 903SWC and fifty rolls of fresh Ilford BW film. The camera has an extremely wide angle lens and produces a tack sharp, forced perspective image. I chose this camera for the project for this reason, and a few other less tangible ones. So I thank you for following along with me on these journeys and here’s a hat tip to your own explorations, whatever that means for you.
Cheers!
Shows
Opening September at the Work-Collective space in Bend Oregon I’ll be showing a selection of the prints from my Wander project from 2021. These prints were shot using a wooden pinhole camera and framed in hand stained repurposed frames. If you’re in Bend this autumn, stop by!
New Prints
I recently added prints from a short series I did several years ago from Washington DC. The portfolio is called The Tenet, exploring the Washington Monument at night.
The power of symbols is strong. Standing at the base of Lincoln, looking down the length of the reflecting pool you can feel it. You can feel the struggles that have gone into making this a more perfect union. It was a warm summer evening and I was here for the first time. I wasn’t feeling current events. Earlier in the week I had a communal lunch at an old Quaker farm and had seen the house my ancestors had lived in over 200 years earlier. This evening was the culmination of those experiences.
If you’ve ever walked around the Mall in Washington DC at night you know how brilliant these monuments light up at night. Their white marble facades shine like democratic parables of an ideal we continually try to aspire to, but may never reach. And maybe that sounds too righteous, after all several of these memorials are to slave owning men. But it’s not just to the men these represent, it’s to their ideals even if they themselves couldn’t live up to them in their own time.
Location: Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC
Technical Info: Hasselblad, Zeiss 50mm, Kodak T-Max 100 BW Film, N+1 developed in Kodak X-tol 1:1