Bleak Beauty Redux

Last year, I worked on this winter hydrangea image which then led to a couple more in a certain palette of yellow/green/brown cast neutrals inspired by Andrew Wyeth's palette and then it picked up an indigo ink tinted scheme. The more graphic motifs/images created by a blank snow canvas against the stark winter flora started to take on a feel of Japanese Prints. I liked this a lot and this year decided to do a couple more and I've put them all together in one place- a digital picture book called Bleak Beauty.

I like how it captures an important strategy for the coming winter months- think beautiful thoughts. Freezing cold weather is much more tolerable re imagined as a few graphic ink strokes in shades of indigo. The images also track a year of developing this kind of image making process- textured, digitally manipulated photographs. Putting them in a book format on the Issuu platform is also a new way of creating short narratives or visual moods that I've been exploring.

I've also made some of the images available as free wallpapers- 

Shadow Book

Yet another day of rain. I decide to work on a project that's been on my list - do something with the shadow pictures I took back in 2000 in San Francisco. When I moved to Potrero Hill I began to notice the shadows of trees and large shrubs on the walls of houses I guess because there were more of them than NYC where I had come from. Also, there may have been something about the distance from the house, or the size of the shrubs and definitely the variety of wall colors. I began to notice some particularly beautiful ones, when the light was good, dreamlike impressions of trees, abstract splashes of dappled light and shadow. I liked how organic they were draped across the geometric planes of doors and gates and grills.

A few weeks before I left San Francisco to return to New York, I walked all around the neighborhood, photographing these shadows so that I could have a record of them. The photo of shadows on wooden shingles is particularly poignant as it's a view from my little cottage- shadows of Wisteria leaves, in my courtyard that had an Avocado tree and Jasmine. It didn't seem right that this collection of botanic shadows was languishing in an old hard drive, it's nice to see them, not forgotten, in a book, just about them.

+ OGMedia:Jardin Majorelle

February Light

The views from the house in Mamaroneck always surprise me as a city dweller not used to looking out at gardens and trees. For some reason this time I became aware of a little more - the distortions of the views through old glass, their reflections caught in mirrors, diffused through lace curtains. The February light seemed to drive distorted pictures of the outside deeper into the house, abstracting them randomly on the glass of bookcases or framed artwork. There were ghostly apparitions of trees caught in the net of fabric shades. It felt like another dimension where the outside had actually seeped in.

Down by the Water

Down by the water things are blurred, abstracted, distorted. The images are from a variety of places Central Park, New York Botanical and Mamaroneck but they all share the same sense of being counterpointed, clear shapes against ripples and blurs, organic lines against rhythmic ones. Something happens when you get close to the water and it changes in an instant.

Manhattan Spring

There's some unique aesthetics of springtime in Manhattan that I really enjoy. One of them is the renewed presence of private 'gardens' in the city. There are some real jewels as the one pictured above found on a street of brownstones in West Chelsea. There's also a certain look to them with their backdrop of paint or masonry- in taupes and terracottas that heightens the color of the flowers leaves, and shadows they throw.

The flowers and new leaves on trees enjoy a similar juxtaposition with the grid of the city- the windows, brickwork and geometric lines of buildings- like an organic melody against the linear rhythms of the architecture. They reflect in the glass and metal of parked cars and windows and bring interesting new color notes to gray shadows and dull walls.

I also love the pairing of painted plywood boarding or the stripes of posters as a backdrop - some of the combinations remind me of kimono prints or oriental screens. The energy in the city in spring also shifts as people walk a little slower, dress a little lighter to enjoy the warmer days and start to crowd the markets and benches as they begin to linger and enjoy being outside again.

Tender Leaves & Yellow Flowers

I'm glad I let the weatherman on TV bother me. I heard him say that the weather was more typically what you would expect in early February. How depressing but so true, the chill just seemed to cling to the city refusing to release its hold. Like everyone else, I continued to trudge around under the weight of winter clothes and on Saturday slid back into hibernation. Come Sunday. though I was eager to get out of the apartment and camera in hand, I set off for Central Park.

Very quickly, it became clear that there was a story being told here. Things had pushed past the bud stage and I was seeing tender young leaves braving the new season. Sometimes this would be spectacular in its isolation, a single shrub or tree moving forward on its own, sometimes in concert. The forsythia was in bloom, as were aconites, daffodils and dogwood. The weeping willow, the red cardinal the sprouting leaves and yellow flowers all whispered reassuringly to me - fear not what the weather man says.

Behind Glass

Walking out of the conservatory at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens I was struck by the views of plants behind glass. It triggered a thought process- could this be the future of gardens? Not a hyper technological sanitized bio bubble dream but a clunky rusted, algae and condensation riddled reality.

It reminded me of the beat up dented spaceships in Ridley Scott's Alien movie. Would walking home past giant glass wrapped apartment buildings be like this with fleeting images of ghostly shadows and mournful decaying leaves that the indoor gardenbots forgot? Then again how lovely to buzz through the glass door of my apartment complex into an orangerie in the depths of winter.

Then I became aware through the camera viewfinder, when it cropped out discernible shapes of plants - compelling abstracted colors and textures. The blurred greens, dark shadows and reflections in the plate glass became abstract paintings confusing the organic with the architectural. When I got home I noticed that I had inadverdently captured a few images of myself reflected in the glass and have decided to bookend this series of images with those blurred self portraits. It captures the immersive, nature of the moment when one is at one with the subject.

Mood Indigo

I posted back in December that I really liked Pantone's color of the year a blue purple that I had an interest in. I want to expand on that with a theme I'm calling Mood indigo. Indigo is technically defined as the color between blue and violet so I'm using that term loosely to look at flowers that span the color range between blue and purple.

Sometimes going back to a subject reinforces certain ideas- one here is that blue flowers look really good together in a monochromatic border. This is borne out in some of the private gardens in Provincetown pictured here as well as the Shakespeare garden in Central Park. Its interesting to read that this held true back in 1901 when Old Time Gardens was published. See this excerpt- where the author reknown North Eastern gardener Alice Morse Earle, writes about "The Blue Border" and names many plants pictured above and many more.

I've been using this blue purple in my work recently - combining it with yellows that tend green and oranges that tend yellow. If you look at page 4 with the Alchemilla Mollis and and at page 6 with the purplish asters with yellow, orange-ish eyes, you can see how well these colors harmonize. One thing I noticed in the moment of taking some of those photos was how luminous the bluer end of this range looks in shade or contrasted against a dark wall or background- see the delphiniums on page 11 or the pansies at the feet of the hostas on page 16. The best example is actuallly the last page- the photo doesn't really do justice to how those Tradescantia glowed in the deep shade. Something that occured to me after I put the photo series together is how much I like the purple Artichoke and Clematis Jackmanii against a white wall or paintwork on pages 12 and 13.

Of all the gardens, I really liked the part of the Shakespeare garden where this color palette was planted in almost a glen like setting with plenty of cool upright ferns, the sculptural shapes of the purplish alliums and intense shots of color from the pansies. The overall effect was beautiful but calming and meditative.

Garden Noir

I've noticed much interest, in the gardening blogosphere, in dark, black or chocolate plants- a taste I share very enthusiastically. There's also been an increasing interest in lemon/lime/chartreuse colored plants so I've put together a little collection of images of what I think works really well together- both of those colors combined. This is something I've been working on in the Mamaroneck garden but its something I also take note of in other gardens I visit - like this one in Provincetown.

What I find interesting about this combination is it creates a sort of Garden Noir- a high contrast, light and shade in the border. As a strict color palette, it works extremely well in a constricted space, and I like how the addition of bronzes like the heucheras and the euphorbias in the photos make it more complex- look at this for a cool riff on those colors.

In the Mamaroneck garden, I'm using this as a base palette- I like how it adds light and shade to what is sometimes overlooked- a lot of green. In focussing on flower choice it's easy to forget that a signifcant part of the overall color is - green. Adding this range of not quite monochromatic hues can really add visual depth and range. At Wave Hill I took note of plants like red perilla and chocolate stemmed sedums to break up the palette. In Mamaroneck the dark leaves of the Weigela Wine and Roses and Berberis Thunbergii 'Rose Glow' do a terrific job of this as does the lemon leaved Spirea and the Creeping Jenny. Some great ideas for plants here and here.

When it comes to layering flower colors on top of this, I prefer richer warmer hues - indigos,corals, fuschias, warm pinks. What I really have in mind is a vintage Madras plaid with dark rich colors mixed with spicier bright colors but more of this when I get going again this year.

The Park in Winter

I woke up this morning to bright sunshine streaming in through my bedroom window and I thought to myself- I must go to the Park.

Central Park is just a hop skip and a subway ride away. Exiting at 110 th street takes you to the north end of the park where the ice rink is. Today I walked all the way from there to the Ritz Hotel at the southernmost end and I was on a mission- I wanted to look with new eyes at the landscape thanks to an inspiring article in the New York Times about Piet Oudolf.

I was surprised to see a fair amount of green in the park, a lot of buds, and a decent amount of shoots. I enjoyed the stark silhouettes of bare branches, long rippling shadows, soggy patches that glittered and the visual chaos of dead grass and tangled branches which I must admit did look a little better back lit or contrasted with a berry or two or a rich brick wall.

Rhodey

Rhodey was the summer house in Westerly, Rhode Island that I shared with a few friends over a period of a few years in the early nineties. It was also known as the Blue House but Rhodey is what we all knew it best by. Not just the house but the whole experience of our weekly escapes. Its the name of all our summers there and for many of us a defines an era that we've been hard pressed to recreate since.

I grew a garden there- a border alongside the house, filled with whatever I could find at the local stores that weekend and whatever survived the dry weeks without watering. Somehow it managed to thrive and welcomed us every week and provided us with herbs for our extravagant dinners that we prepared and ate amid great laughter.