Category Archives: art

art, landscape, photography, places

some of my favorite photographs

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My visit after Christmas to the Getty Center had as its main destination an exhibit of photographs by Carleton Watkins.

Watkins worked all over the West Coast, and was the first person to develop an important body of work on Yosemite. The show contained beautifully preserved examples of his photographs, including a few that rank up there among my all-time favorite photographs ever taken.

Carleton Watkins: El Capitan

Carleton Watkins: El Capitan, 1860s [ Library of Congress ]

More than one person has argued that Watkins is the first important artist to come out of California, regardless of medium, and I would not argue that point. There’s a poise and stillness to the work. The images seem to float in their own time and space that extends to infinity.

Even after an hour in a crowded series of galleries, the work left me with a sense of stillness that I still feel, over a week later. (The fact that I’m still on vacation also probably has something to do with it…)

watkinsfirstviewofyosemitevalley

Carleton Watkins: First View of the Yosemite Valley from the Mariposa Trailca. 1866.

In the image to the left, El Capitan, the light-colored mass of granite to the distance in the left, balances elegantly with the bulk of the nearer hillside on the right. It’s an amazingly formal, modern image. I don’t know of any drawing, painting or other photograph from up to this time that looks anything like it.

(This is one of two versions of this image taken at the same time from the same vantage point. I prefer the other version of this image, which is in the Getty show. I wasn’t able to find anything on the web to borrow of either version, so this quick shot out of one of my books that at least gives you an idea of the image.)

Carleton Watkins: Cape Horn, Columbia River

Carleton Watkins: Cape Horn, Columbia River, 1867 [ National Gallery of Art ]

I had a conversation with Roy Flukinger, Curator of Photography & Film at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, about nineteenth century landscape photographs. He spoke of a “transubstantiation” of matter that occurs in many of them, where the long exposures and photographic techniques rendered water, air and land to be almost equivalent materials. In the image above, the water and sky and distant mountains merge into each other. The cliffs to the right seem to float over the water. At the same time, they seem to fit into the rocks to the left like a key fits into a lock, or the way the shape of Africa reaches across the Atlantic to nestle into the empty space of the Caribbean on a map.

Carlton Watkins: Cape Horn near Celilo, 1867

Carleton Watkins: Cape Horn near Celilo, 1867 [ Metropolitan Museum of Art ]

The quietness and sense of infinite space in this one is phenomenal. If your blood pressure doesn’t drop ten points after viewing this image, nothing will bring it down!

Dialogue Among Giants: Carleton Watkins and the Rise of Photography in California runs until March 1.

art, gardening

molds–the good kind

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In 1999 I went to an exhibition examining some artists’ response to natural processes. Out of all the pieces the work of Daniel Ladd stayed stuck in my mind all these years. On display were gourds that he had grown into molds shaped like human bodies. With surfaces as smooth as polished stone the process only gave itself away when you noticed the gourd stems.

Dan Ladd. Moulded gourd [ source ]

To do the pieces in the show, Ladd formed molds out of plaster using reproductions of classical sculptures. The mold was then placed in the garden and a young Lagenaria gourd placed inside. As the gourd was allowed to mature inside, it took on the shape of the mold. After frost, the mold was removed, revealing the artwork.

Ladd also uses other shapes as mold forms, but the ones I find most affecting are these torsos. When I started assembling this post I found his website which had maybe a dozen different examples of his gourd sculptures. When I looked again he’d taken them down. So you’ll have to imagine what they looked like based on this specimen that someone had preserved away from his site.

In addition to the gourd art, Ladd also works with elaborately manipulated living plants to form growing sculptures. The whole topiary-like idea of reshaping nature is there in these works, but the results are pretty different. His site, even though it’s currently a work in progress, has some examples.

In researching this post I ran into a whole pile of other things in this general area of vegetable torture, including another artist employing a similar technique.

Mary Catherine Newcomb. Molded eggplant from Product of Eden [ source ]

Mary Catherine Newcomb is a Canadian sculptor who also molds vegetables into human shapes. She then can add non-vegetable details, as you see to the left, in a project currently at the Rodman Hall Art Centre at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.

On the vine, the sculptures are fun, though they don’t have the presence of Ladd’s work. When she takes her veggies and preserves them in glass bottles, however, they turn into something weird and unsettling, like embryos preserved in formaldehyde. Icky icky icky. I want one.

The art of molding gourds isn’t an invention by Ladd. In fact it goes back centuries in China, with its current master practitioner being Zhang Cairi. I have a dim recollection of having heard that vegetables were also molded in southern Europe–things like eggplant and tomatoes. That’s an area for me to do a little more research in. I’ll post anything I find out here. And if you know anything about, please let me know.

A few other gourd and molded vegetable resources:

VegiForms, a commercially available series of molds that lets you turn your fruit into cute sculptures.

Gourd art of other sorts. These are basically “just” decorated gourds.

Jim Story on shaping gourds, via the American Gourd Society.

Jim Widess demonstrates making molded portrait gourds.

Book: The Immortal Molded Gourds of Mr Zhang Cairi by Betty Finch and Guojun Zhang.

art, places

farmers with too much time on their hands

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Problem: The rice paddy in your backyard vegetable garden is just plain blah. You need to spice it up.

Solution:

Unlike the grass art I posted last Friday, which was made with varying the amount of light given to the grass, this pattern is made with planting different kinds of rice to make the pattern. The technique may be more conventional, but the result is still pretty cool…

Image spotted on the Gamil Design blog [ source ]

art, gardening, photography

chemistry, physics, biology

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Here’s a cool artwork by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey that was featured at the recent Wimbledon tennis-thing. It’s made of three panels of grass.

Wimble grass art

The sections were grown in a darkened space under artificial lights that projected through photographic negatives. The brighter the exposure, the richer the green color.

It’s the reverse principle at work as leaving a hose or board on your lawn for a week: When you pick up the hose or board you can see how the grass grew pale where it was deprived of sunlight.

So what would you call this art process? It’s basically using light to effect a transformation of some kind of material, and that’s pretty much the definition of photography.

Photography’s first revolution was the ability to use chemical processes to fix an image made by light–think of the photographer disappearing into a darkroom with some unpromising plates or film and coming back with a magical image. Then the physics of turning light sensors into electrical impulses made chemistry-free imaging possible, leading to things like television cameras and your cellphone camera.

And now comes this process where the recording device is biological. Of course, relying on something living and growing, the result is anything but permanent, but that’s also one of the nice things about the pieces. Nothing lasts forever.

The grass artwork reminds me of Dennis Oppenheim’s brilliant 1970 photographic performance, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, where he leaves a book on his chest as the exposed parts of him sunburn on the beach. The first picture shows him at the beginning, with the book. In the second, hours later with the book removed, a sunburn describes the area where the book protected him.

Dennis Oppenheim Reading Position for Second Degree BurnDennis Oppenheim. Reading Position for Second Degree Sunburn. Chromogenic prints with applied text.

It’s just as much a “biological photograph” as the Wimbledon piece. While the grass piece stuns most in its execution, the Oppenheim piece, coming out of conceptual art, buzzes with ideas and humor.

Next time you come back from the beach with untanned patches where your swimsuit shaded your body, why not consider yourself a walking photograph?


[ Thanks to Landscape+Urbanism, where I first saw the Wimbledon grass pieces, and to Creative Review, where I’ve linked. ]

art, landscape, photography

one perfect juniper

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Saturday night I was at a gathering that included Michael Lundgren, a photographer visiting from Arizona where he teaches and works. He’d brought along a portfolio of prints from his Transfigurations series, images that will be included in his upcoming book by the same title to be published at the end of this year by Radius Books.

The photographs in the series work together beautifully, murmuring softly to each other, echoing each other’s forms or textures or moods. With bodies of interrelated work like this it’s almost a shame to isolate a single image. But books being what they are, you generally have space on the front cover for just one, and the one that was picked for Transfigurations is a beauty.

Cover of Michael Lundgren's book

So here we have a single, perfect, amazingly symmetrical juniper tree on a little rise or ledge overlooking an expanse of desert. It feels like the end of the day, that special time when the land seems to glow from within, when the earth seems to gently release its last reserves of the day’s light, like power discharging from a battery, as it prepares for night.

People often think of the desert as a hostile world, but for plants like this juniper that are adapted to what the desert offers and demands, there’s no better home.

To see more images, visit Michael Lundgren’s site.

art, landscape design, places

out of darkness something blooms

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I had a few CDs cross my desk that were recorded by a San Diego new music collective called Trummerflora. Their name sounded interesting, but I didn’t think another thing about it. Then in the booklet of one of the discs I read its definition:

Trummerflora, or rubble plants and trees, are a special phenomenon unique to heavily bombed urban areas. The bomb acts as a plow, mixing rubble fragments with the earth, which often contain seeds dormant for a century or more. These seeds come to light and those that can live in this new and special earth grow and flourish.
–Helen and Newton Harrison

So something beautiful comes to light through acts of unspeakable destruction. Suddenly I though that it was an amazing word and a concept that holds out some hope that something good can come out of the worst of situations. Of course, this is a particularly tainted kind of goodness, a sort of goodness that you accept because the alternative is so much worse.

Trawling around the web as I write this I couldn’t find other references to this word other than in the context of the musicians or the quote from the Harrisons. Did the Harrisons coin the word? (Of course, just becuase search engines don’t turn up something, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! (Or in this increasingly virtual word, maybe that’s exatly what it means?)) Or did the word spring to life–maybe in Germany?–after the devastation of World War II?


Helen and Newton Harrison. Breathing Space for the Sava River, Yugoslavia, 1988 (detail). Photocollage, text, maps. [ source ]

This whole notion of bringing life back to wastelands has been one of the major themes of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, the artists responsible for the quote in the first place. As a couple they taught at the University of California, San Diego from 1969-1993, and during this time I had the chance to see several of their exhibitions around town. Here’s a description of their working method in Barbara Matilsky’s 1992 book, Fragile ecologies: Contemporary artist’s interpretations and solutions, quoted on a Green Museum page.

After firsthand study, research and interviews with ecologists, biologists and planners the artists create a photographic narrative that identifies the problem, questions the system of beliefs that allow the condition to develop and proposes initiatives to counter environmental damage. They exhibit their documentation in a public forum–a museum, library, city hall–to stimulate discussion, debate, and media attention. By communication to the public the problems that confront a fragile ecosystem and the ways in which the balance can be restored, they exert pressure on the political system and rally public opinion in an attempt to avert ecological disaster.

So, while the Newtons would be pleased to see trommerflora grow and thrive, their greater satisfaction wouldn’t be achieved until we come to an understanding of the systems that brought about the original destruction. And if the projects became so successful that they’d annihilate the need for its the artwork’s own existence? I doubt the Newtons would mind, but I won’t be holding my breath that we get there anytime soon.

Read further: The Newtons in their own words.

art, my garden, photography, plant profiles

beautiful decay

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Here’s another recently completed image in my Destructive Testing series, “Comparative Wilt Test.”

James SOE NYUN: Comparative Wilt Test


James SOE NYUN: Comparative Wilt Test: Oenothera, Osteospermum, Oxalis. Digital pigment print, 16 x 20 inches.

The original photos were taken in the late 90s, and my original intention was to print them sequentially so that you could see the wilting in process. I tried that, but then decided it wasn’t interesting enough. Recently I decided to revisit some of the negatives using Photoshop. I ended up superimposing five of the original images and used different kinds and degrees of transparency for each layer. I like this result much better, though I could also see this turning into a stop-motion video at some point.

The image memorializes a pseudo-science experiment I conducted to see how three different flowering plants would behave when cut off the mother plant, lashed to some supports, then allowed to wilt over the course of several days. The victims in this case are three plants in the garden I was having some ill feelings towards: Mexican evening primrose (Oenothera speciosa), freeway daisy (Osteospermum fruticosum), and Bermuda buttercup (Oxalis pes-caprae).

My primrose problems went back to a packet of “wildflower seed” that I’d purchased as a souvenir at the Grand Canyon in the early 1990s. The picture on the packet was appealing: delicate pink flowers on a dainty plant. And they were wildflowers! At first I was thrilled that the sprinkling of seed I applied to some desolate ground in the front yard started to germinate. I was even happier when there was that first extravagant first flowering, with dozens to hundreds of the papery, soft pink flowers covering the plants so you couldn’t see the barren ground anymore.

Okay, if you know the plant, I can tell you’re laughing and know where this is headed… But as I soon found out, as pretty as it is, this is one aggressive plant, reseeding tenaciously and spreading quickly by putting out dense webs of underground runners. More than ten years later, I’m still pulling at the stems that continue to come up in that bed. And even though they’re wildflowers, they’re not native to San Diego. Fortunately for the local ecosystem, they haven’t escaped from the bed where I naively gave them the gift of life.

Plant number two, the freeway daisy, had similar issues. It started out life as a tiny plant in a four-inch pot but soon spread like a demon, swallowing up a number of little annuals that stood in its way. At least the plant didn’t reseed much, and the stems, though they can sometimes set down root, were easy enough to control.

The final plant, the Bermuda buttercup, is a common and obnoxious weed over much of coastal Southern California. During its peak bloom in the middle of spring the perky yellow flowers over the attractive clover-ish leaves are a nice sight. But once you have it, you’ll probably have it forever.

art, photography

all stems

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Speaking of cut flowers, I often think that the most beautiful part of what’s in the vase isn’t necessarily the blooms. Photographer Lee Friedlander, whose work often exhibits a droll-to-bratty iconoclastic bent, did a book just a few years ago that was titled Stems. (The Photo-Eye online bookstore uses the BookTease feature that lets you take a look at some of the images in the book.)

Stems book coverAs you might guess from the title, it’s almost exclusively photos of plants in vases where the flowers have been cropped out of the picture. It’s a little willful, for sure, but I think many of the images are really beautiful. See what you think…

art, landscape, photography, places, rambles

virtual vacations: then

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In talking about visiting places virtually it’s easy to get caught up in our totally cool advanced state of technology and forget that this sort of visit-by-proxy has been going on for ages.

Homer’s Odyssey gave listeners accounts–albeit mythical–of distant worlds and peoples. In The Persian Wars Herodotus gave readers a more accurate travelogue of places they would very likely never encounter on their own.

The visual arts have always played a strong informational function in this way. Topographically-motivated paintings–works done with varying degrees of verisimilitude–go back to the early days of representation, and gained a high level of polish by the time of the Dutch landscapists such as Albert Cuyp, Salomon van Ruysdael and Jan van Goyen. Paintings by Canaletto, in addition to being snazzy souvenirs for wealthy travelers on the Grand Tour, gave viewers perspectively accurate renditions of an exotic Italy. And the list goes on…

Canaletto. Venice – Grand Canal
Looking South-West from the Chiesa degli Scalzi to the Fondamenta della Croce, with San Simeone Piccolo. c. 1738.
Oil on canvas – National Gallery, London, UK.
[ source ]


When photography came along its main-line link to reality and reputation for truthfulness kicked up the perceived value of its artifacts as ways to know the world. When the photographic stereoview took the already hyper-real photograph and rammed it into three dimensions people found it revelatory. Millions of stereoviews flooded the market, and you could take virtual vacations to most of the known world: Egypt, South America, Europe, the American West–all over.

Here are a few of my handful of 1870s eBay stereoviews of places in the west I’m particularly interested in. If you’ve never practiced “free viewing”–basically letting your eyes relax to the point where the left eye focuses on the left image and the right on the right one–give it a try with these. The process might be easier if you click on the image to enlarge it. You know that you’re on the right track when you start to see three images, the left one on the left, the right one on the right, and the stereo composite in between.

(Remember the “Magic Eye” pictures from the 1990s? Those posters of seemingly random piles of pixels where some sort of cheesy 3D image would suddenly come to life when you got your eyes to relax just so? If you could make those pop, you’ve got the idea behind stereo free-viewing down.)

This first is a basic Carleton Watkins view of Yosemite Valley:

Watkins Yosemite Valley stereoview


And this is a shot of Lamon’s cabin, the “first” structure built in Yosemite Valley. (I doubt the Native Americans inhabiting the Valley lived alfresco year round, however…)Lamon's cabin, Yosemite Valley


A Southwestern montane forest photographed by Timothy H. O’Sullivan during the 1873 Wheeler expedition, one of the great Western surveys:O'Sullivan meadow stereoview


And finally a shot of Kanab Canyon taken by William Bell during the 1872 Wheeler expedition. But wait! What the hell is in this picture? In the finest tradition of using Google Maps to find accidentally recorded images of naked people, could this be? A naked man?Naked guy in Kanab Canyon stereoview


Yeah, tourism and voyeurism, hand in hand, even back then…

art

some stunning 17th century botanical illustrations

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Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) is the subject of an exhibition at L.A.’s Getty Museum running through August 31. A German entomologist and painter of the natural world, Merian produced a number of amazingly detailed and wonderful illustrations for her books. The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname, her major work, presents work deriving from two years of illustrating and collecting she and a daughter she did in South America. (That trip sounds like it must have been an amazing story: a mother and her daughter, selling everything they owned, to leave Europe to do science in the wilds all the way across the world–all that circa 1700…)

Merian illustration

Maria Sibylla Merian. A plate taken from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium [ source ]

The book has great images of bugs–as you might imagine. But she portrayed the bugs in symbiosis with the plant world around them. As a consequence, the botanical images are also amazing.



Maria Sibylla Merian. A blue honey creeper on a thistle, copulating snails below [ source ]

There are a number of new and used books by Merian, as well as several original paintings or engravings, available through AbeBooks. These are important works, so to buy an original illustration or early edition might set you back a couple of bucks…