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craft fiber art inspiration mindfulness photography spirituality

cloud watching

When I was sixty, I had a revelation I should have had when I was six. Between classes at work, I liked to lie on my back on a bench outside and gaze at the sky. I was lying there on a warm summer day, the sky clear blue above and to the north over Lake Erie but with a bank of cumulus clouds looming from the southwest. I looked up at the emptiness above, closed my eyes, then opened them and saw a faint puff of white overhead. As I watched, it slowly grew, took on a visual substantiality as it drifted southward where it melded with another small cloud I’d overlooked.

I wondered where it had come from.

Then out of the corner of my eyes I caught sight of another tiny, thin, puffy, slow emergence drifting to join the other.

Then I saw it.

Directly overhead a cloud emerged from nothing, out of thin air in the most literal sense. Growing, transforming, drifting to join the others that were now disappearing against the mottled gray background of the cumulus bank. Over and over I watched the emptiness above give forth faint wisps that grew and drifted away. I saw clouds being born.

As a rational adult I understood what I witnessed. My location was perhaps a thousand yards south of the Lake Erie. As air moved from the lake over land ,humidity condensed with the change in temperature. But this simple atmospheric phenomenon struck me as miraculous because it upset the unquestioned assumptions I had used since childhood to understand the world: that everything comes from somewhere, that what is undetectable to the sensate mind doesn’t exist, that meaning is governed by the mind’s ability to trace the origins of things.

This miracle proved to me by personal experience (and isn’t personal experience the only irrefutable authority for truth?) that nothing gives forth something. I suddenly saw what hadn’t been there, or what had been there but had been invisible, as the humidity was there before the cloud was born.

Cloud watching has taught me what little I know about the creative process. As an artist, what I create is the invisible passing through a temporary form. My images, like clouds, come from nowhere and become now here.nsa

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photography Uncategorized

edges

Because I usually prefer a square print and work with rectangular negatives, I have to pay particular attention to cropping. I hardly ever see the edge of my image through the lens. When I shoot I am drawn to an element of light and I place it within the lens frame where I think it might eventually be in the print, but I’m not fanatical about it. Cropping in the dark room adds another stage to the creative process. It can be done with a degree of deliberation not possible when shooting in the field in ambient light that is always changing.

In determining the edge of an image I consider three options: closed frame, open frame, and broken frame. Which option I choose isn’t just a matter of where I place the edge of the image. It’s really a matter of how the edge interacts with the overall composition of the photo.

Closed Frame Rocky River 111
A closed frame implies nothing outside the frame has any particular relevance to the image. The image is complete unto itself. In general, such images are carefully composed with the attention of the viewer directed toward specific elements. In complex images if the eye is tempted to explore, there are elements to direct it away from the edge and back into the center of the image. Such framing is the most conventional type and is the mainstay of studio work and commercial photography. Closed frame pictures are the closest to pure artifice, creating a reality sufficient unto itself that may or may not have anything to do with the real world the viewer occupies.

Open Frame Rocky River 94
An open frame creates the impression that the subject of the image is only part of a larger reality beyond the edge of the picture, as though one is watching life unfold through the arbitrary constriction of a window. It allows for the possibility that the focus of the viewer’s attention may be anywhere within the image, even–in the extreme–outside the image itself. Open frame compositions may appear more chaotic than closed frame compositions and have the effect of making the viewer consider the relationship of the image to the real world of which it is only a limited reflection.

Broken Frame
An image with a broken frame both has and doesn’t have an edge. This is accomplished by printing an image with some white space at the edge so there is nothing to mark the boundary between that part of the image and the paper it is printed on. Such images are rare. When I first began printing in this way, I met with resistance from viewers disconcerted by their inability to tell where the image ended or began. To requests that I reprint such photographs, burning the white sections until a clear edge appeared, I politely declined. It is important to me, in such photographs, that the paper isn’t just a surface on which the image rested but is itself an integral part of the image.

Over time I have become more interested in broken frame, particularly in the photo abstractions of the series Obsessive Emulsion Disorder. Without a clear and complete edge, an image seems not entirely artifice but actually fuses with the world of which it is an assumed reflection. When looking at such an image, we are not only looking at the world through art, we are looking at the world itself. Such images also serve to remind the viewer that when we look at the world itself, we are looking at art of which our consciousness is an essential part.eyelids

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cleveland photography travel

photographing the familiar

Tourists takes tourist photos which are limited, inevitably, to shots of features—mountains, shores, bays, sunsets, waterfalls, architecture, the list seems endless—to which they are attracted because they aren’t accustomed to them in their familiar environments. What they see are only the most salient features of where they are, often made so by commercialization. One must inhabit a landscape over time, perhaps for a lifetime, if one is to photograph its true character.
I have lived along the south shore of lake Erie for forty years, the last twenty in an inner ring suburb of Cleveland that abuts the Cleveland Metroparks Rocky River reservation. From my back yard I can step down to Coe Creek and follow its soggy path for a quarter mile to the river itself. This is the reality with which I am familiar.
The Rocky River reservation runs for thirteen miles through layers of clay, shale and gray sandstone from the river’s mouth in lake Erie to a tumbling water fall in Berea, Ohio. Beyond that, the park becomes the Mill Stream Run reservation, another part of the countywide parks system locals call the Emerald Necklace. The level of the river changes dramatically because of late winter thaws, soaking spring rains and summer thunderstorms. But in all seasons, if one is patient, it is possible to walk those thirteen miles in the river itself. When the river is high, bridle paths and hiking trails too numerous to count along the riverbanks offer alternative routes through the dense deciduous forest. The Rocky River, my home, is a photographer’s paradise.
Over the years, I have covered these thirteen miles in small increments more times than I can remember. A typical excursion for me is a three or four hour walk actually in or beside the river during which I may take five or six shots. Early on I carried a Toyo 4×5, then graduated to a vintage Deardorff 8×10. Camera, tripod, film carriers and lenses together weigh forty pounds or more, so I carry an Amish oak cattle prod as a walking staff to help with balance in the rough terrain. In the beginning I walked in the morning on the unquestioned assumption that morning light is the most flattering. Ten years later, it occurred to me to walk in the afternoon and I saw for the first time an entirely different landscape. Around the summer solstice when light is most abundant, I walk at midday when the cover is thickest, the shadows deepest, and the effects most dramatic.
High water in the river is a light caramel color, heavy with silt. It reflects nothing of the sky but clears quickly as the level falls. Then it becomes what Thoreau, in Walden, calls skywater. Low water is geaaanerally a pale yellowish green and so transparent that sluggish carp and weary steelhead are perfectly visible in the pools and currents. The bed is variously gravel, tumbled boulders, fractured sandstone, or delicate mosaics of shale. In season, algae soften the contours of the riverbed. And then, of course, there is the long season of ice, from sheets as fine as mica to great slabs riding up the backs of other great slabs in the current at the river’s mouth.
It is never easy walking. When tired, I can find a fallen tree to sit on. They are everywhere in the woods. If one sits quietly enough, one begins to notice a dying tree teems with life. Both flora and fauna congregate there, from the tiniest insects transforming the wood into a spongy hummus, to the white tale deer that browse on the wild flowers springing from the moss underfoot. A fallen tree is the scene of a feeding frenzy—fungus, insects, worms, birds, snakes, voles, mice, squirrels, raptors, all dining in succession on the tree and each other. And that’s just during the day. Raccoon, opossum and coyote scat shows the feasting continues unabated at night.
I often wonder how much of this anyone really sees. Most people who pass through this environment seem to have an agenda: taking a short cut to the freeway, monitoring their calorie burn, improving their split times as they train for a marathon. The majority of tourists to Cleveland don’t see this landscape at all, unless it is through the tiny window of a plane landing at Hopkins International. They are much more likely to ride the rapid downtown, take a photograph of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to show their friends and family at home. “Look,” they might say. “This is what I saw in Cleveland.”
“Toward the Light” is my portfolio of the Rocky River. It is what someone familiar with Cleveland sees.

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cleveland photography spirituality Uncategorized

toward the light

Toward the Light is my experience exploring the distinctive qualities of light in Cleveland, Ohio, where I live.
I know very little about the physics of light, and I am a self-trained photographer, so I can’t speak technically about it. But in my experience Cleveland light has its own character perhaps shared somewhat with other parts of the Great Lakes region.
It may have something to do with the latitude, though I doubt it, because the light in San Francisco, where I spend part of my year, is also of the same latitude but seems sharper.
I suspect it has to do with the humidity caused by lake Erie. The evaporation over the lake and drifting condensation over the land produce what locals know as a Cleveland sky, dense and lowering in the winter, high and soft and sculptural in the summer—a sky unseen anywhere else I have traveled. The resulting environment is a narrow rain forest along the lakeshore that fades away into the drier climate of central Ohio. Near the lake, the lambency of a humid August morning bathes the air with a light that rises from the ground, and Spring fog swaddles new foliage with a pale florescent glow as it floats in the air. Throughout the seasons, Cleveland light is always soft and forgiving.
Apart from the lake, there is so much water in the Cleveland environment—puddles, ponds, streams, rivers, marshes–that light is always rising from reflective sources to surprise the eye as it moves through the landscape. Even in deep woods, trees can be momentarily foot-lighted by pools of stagnant water as beams of passing light shoot through gaps in the foliage overhead.Rocky River 113
What light falls on or passes through has much to do with how the quality of light expresses itself. Forest City was Cleveland’s original name and remains its nickname today, a testament to the density and extent of woods that cover the sinuous moraines deposited by the glaciers that formed the Great Lakes. It is possible, of course, thanks to architecture and agriculture, to escapes the woods and gaze directly at the sky, but the characteristic Cleveland experience—urban, suburban, exurban and rural—is still the walk under foliage or, in winter, its vast skeletal framework.
One thing I’ve learned photographing Cleveland is that leaves are always translucent. They can be almost opaque when plump with moisture and green with chlorophyll, but by Fall they have become thin, veiny, even lacy with only their ribs impeding the passage of light. The vast majority of Cleveland’s trees are deciduous, and the variety is unrivaled, meaning the shapes and colors of leaves seem infinitely varied. And the colors are in constant change, from the first lime-green buds of April to the last tan oak leaves clinging to bare limbs in January. Every variety has its distinctive palette throughout the seasons, so Cleveland autumn displays are distinct, if not for their brightness at least for their range of color. Light is constantly being filtered and colored by foliage through most of the year. And if that isn’t enough variety, the foliage, for the most part, is in steady, delicate motion. To the black and white photographer, this means the tonal range in a landscape can be so subtle that edges often blur.
Whatever the reasons, the light in Cleveland is alive, and the eye must be fully present to witness it.

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fiber art inspiration Uncategorized

mindfulness and craft

“Non-thinking repetition of mechanical forms allows one to concentrate simply on being without the distraction of having to make decisions, artistic or otherwise.” (Leonard Koren, Wabi Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers , p.35)

Those in the artistic community who derogate certain kinds of craft sometimes call it mindless repetition. There is, though, an important difference between mindless repetition and, as Koren says, “non-thinking repetition.”
If one values the practice of craft for its qualities as a meditative activity, as I do, then to call it mindless is simply incorrect, for the essence of any truly meditative act is mindfulness. Certainly this must be what Koren means. Non-thinking repetition is mindful repetition. The meditative crafter seeks to be fully present in the moment by transcending the distraction posed by thoughts, detaching from them so as not to be drawn away from the present reality by following them.
Mindlessness, on the other hand, is not just thoughtlessness, but unconsciousness, as though one practices a craft in one’s sleep. It is possible, I suppose, for crafters to practice mindlessly, producing in a sort of mental blackout. But crafters I know who are passionate about their mediums describe to me a state of total engagement, not trance-like disengagement.
If we agree that all thought is the product of ego, then the goal of meditative, or mindful craft is ego-lessness. And this I think is the reason western art insists on relegating cblue tiesraft to the fringes of the artistic community. Truly, western art seems too often to be all about ego.
So what happens when one practices non-thinking craft? What role is consciousness playing in the act? Is the mind really, as Koren suggests, making decisions?
Being fully present means opening one’s consciousness to the experience of what is arising. When I cross stitch, I work on blank aida cloth with as few preconceptions as possible. In the beginning years, I tried to work with motifs or realize complex patterns that had suggested themselves to me in my dreams or during sitting meditation. Over time I learned to free myself from such preconceptions and now stitch with as little intent as I am capable of. The simple x pattern is the ritual form that initiates the meditative state. As each stich completes itself, options present themselves: up/down, left/right on the cloth. The needle is called to one of them and repeats the ritual pattern. Immediately form emerges: lines, squares, curves, angles. If one stitches with colored thread, as many do, colors call for other colors, color and form begin to interact, complex patterns arise. The mindful worker responds by plying the needle as the emerging image directs it. The reward is the realization that the mind is a co-equal participant in the arising.
So what is really happening? The only decision the crafter makes is whether to be the emerging image or detach from it in order to try to control it. The mind practicing the craft collaborates with the medium and the potential in the emptiness of the blank canvas to bring the image forth. The mind is a midwife of sorts, a useful, even necessary facilitator of the process of becoming.
The ego’s only role is to ply the needle.

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cleveland photography

obsessive emulsion disorder

 

The photo abstractions in the on-going series I like to call Obsessive Emulsion Disorder are made without using a camera. I expose black and white sheet film to a bare light bulb to produce a solid black negative in which all possible visual information (in the form of silver halide grains) is present. The black negative is a metaphor of chaos, but within that chaos is the potential for an infinite array of meaningful patterns waiting to reveal itself.
This revelation is accomplished by soaking the black negative in water, which slowly dissolves the colloid. This releases the silver, which can re-arrange itself free of any ego intent. The silver migrates on the film plane, slumping and thickening, or spreading and thinning. Different degrees of viscosity in the colloid influence how the silver OED 4halide moves and how thick or thin it becomes. I can intervene at this point to influence the movement, but seldom do. My only tools for assisting the migration of the silver are a drinking straw to blow on the negative and an eyedropper for filling in abandoned space.
The next step is to reverse the process by drying the negative through evaporation, which hardens the colloid and fixes in place the redistributed silver halide. This often introduces fracturing, granulation and crystalization into the process. Most negatives are finished in two to three weeks. The longest I have spent on a single negative is 179 days.
The photographic enlargements resulting from these negatives are non-documentary images with the precision, detail, and tonal range of traditional documentary photography but with no documentary connection to the world. They do not and cannot represent perceptions or preconceptions by the artist. The images emerge from somewhere other than the artist’s ego, specifically from the chaotic potential of the film emulsion itself, though the darkroom artist is a necessary catalyst in the process.
I began using 4 x 5 negatives but have moved to 8 x 10, which I often scan and print digitally because I find imagery in sections of the negative (2 x 2 or less) too small to print with an enlarger.
My experience creating Obsessive Emulsion Disorder has convinced me there is no way to predict the outcome of this process, so when my ego tries to exert control it fails. Every image contains an element of surprise. When the result holds my attention over a sustained period of time, I feel I have achieved something spiritual—a heightened awareness of aspects of reality previously unseen.

The series Obsessive Emulsion Disorder received an Ohio Arts Council Award for individual excellence in photography.

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inspiration photography

seeing upright

A universal spiritual principal I dedicate myself to is the ideal of neither desiring nor fearing any particular experience. The ways in which the world’s wisdom traditions express this ideal are numerous and varied. It is the ideal behind the notion of Acceptance, whether of Truth, or the Tao, or, God’s will. It is the meaning of Obedience and the essence of Humility. It is the Zen principal of Equanimity commonly expressed as Being Upright, a state of consciousness in which we neither lean toward experience in a state of desire, nor lean away in a state of aversion.

Much of my artistic practice has been an effort to embody this ideal in my work. I’ve asked myself what it would mean to create art that fosters being upright in the viewer. A simple answer would be to make representational allegories that depict the spiritual consequences of desire and aversion. But that kind of didacticism exploits fear and desire, encouraging those very states of being in order to manipulate the viewer into rejecting them. Such effort seems self-defeating. Work of this sort would be like the art school assignment of the photo essay, which I have little interest in because, as I get older, I have little if anything to say about the world.

The more difficult response is to strive for art that invites the viewer into a state of equanimity free of fear and desire. This means art that is valued less for what it refers to in the world, than for its ability to hold the viewer’s eye in a still point of contemplation. Knowing the nature of that still point seems the key.

The  questions easily leads to consideration of a commonly observed difference between trained and untrained (or primitive) art.

Trained art cultivates depth perspective, which has the effect—whether intended or not—of making the viewer aware of his individual point of view. We feel near to parts of an image and far from others. This can only happen if consciousness resides in a fixed position in relation to the image. The fixed position determines the ego identity. Where one stands in the world is who one is.

But while strengthening self-consciousness by affirming the ego identity, depth perspective has the simultaneous effect of reinforcing fear and desire. The ego tries to make near what it wants and make far what it doesn’t, the way a camera, for example, makes near what is important and far what is not. The ego is never still, I think. It is always fleeing from or grasping at experience. That is why trained photographic art might be best described as an ego with a camera.

Primitive art, on the other hand, generally de-emphasizes or ignores perspective altogether. The viewer sees near and far as the same, meaning the viewer’s consciousness is both near and far and not defined by the ego.

In a review of Obsessive Emulsion Disorder, a critic described the work as flat. I took this to mean OED minimizes the dimensionality, or depth perspective, essential to representational photography, which in fact it often does. Perhaps the critic got the point. Viewing an emulsion disorder can be akin to viewing a mandala where one’s eye is not moved three-dimensionally in the work in order to produce a reaction to its subject matter. One instead inhabits the work in a contemplative gaze, perhaps achieving the still point and seeing upright.idontknow

Categories
cleveland inspiration photography

what am i doing with a camera?

I do not consider myself a documentary photographer because I do not believe photography has a documentary imperative. From a spiritual perspective, to grasp at life in order to create some sort of permanence is a misperception of reality, so to believe the camera preserves a moment in time is to believe photography perpetuates a delusion. Life is a process of perpetual becoming, of infinite creation. Life is art, and the meaning of art is the process itself: from inspiration, through creation to perception by another. This is the meaningful narrative arc repeated endlessly through the illusion of time. Photography can only tell the truth if it affirms this.

So if I am not documenting the world with my camera, what am I doing? Perhaps an explanation of how I became a photographer will help make it clear.

In the early 1990s I attended an exhibition of Ray Metzker’s landscapes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The work literally took my breath away. The illusion of time disappeared in the viewing of his images and I felt completely alive.

Being artistically and spiritually naïve, I thought the proper response was to incorporate what I had seen into my sense of who I was. So I went into the woods with a camera to re-create a “Metzker Landscape,” working first with a 35 mm pentax, then a toyo 4 x 5, and eventually a deardorff 8 x10. Such folly was a form of grasping and could only end in failure.

Re-creating Metzker’s work was, of course, impossible, but I kept shooting and processing and printing because these activities themselves engaged me. Over the years, my work improved so that I eventually began to take pleasure from looking at my images. What I experienced when I saw them was not to remember Metzker’s remarkable photographs, even less to remember the subject of the particular picture I had taken. My delight (if that is the right word) came from the resuscitation of the feeling of making the photograph. Not that seeing the images made me remember standing in the river or field with all of my senses engaged, experiencing the light, handling the equipment and calculating the aperture and speed. What I experienced on viewing the images was the recreation of the feeling of being fully in the present moment—in short, of being completely alive.

This is what I seek in any work of art I view: the experience of being fully in the present moment. It is all that I hope to provoke in others through my own work.

One of my chosen media for this is the darkroom. Whether the subject of a photograph arises by means of the camera from the world around me, or without the camera from the infinite potential of the film emulsion itself doesn’t matter. What does matter is being completely alive.Rocky River 217