the price one pays...

Hind sight is twenty-twenty.

Lesson: Never leave an anthotype out if you are going to be 70 miles away unable to rescue it.

The large anthotype may have been a casualty of the the late evening rainstorm. I put it out this morning since we've been starved for direct sun for a week and finally it came out in the a.m. It was sunny when we drove out around 2 pm heading to Columbus to install "The Naturalists". We didn't get home until about an hour ago and by that time a couple of showers had moved through the area. It's back in the garage "drying out".

The price one pays for a little artistic multi tasking. Matting work for the O.C. Measuring and hanging work in Columbus. Trying to get the anthotype to fade.

Pics of the installed Naturalists exhhibition in a couple of days. I still have to pack work for Orange Coast College.

if a naturalist designed a flag...

Last minute, frantic yet still somewhat perfectionist printing framing for two March exhibitions. So let the loopy-ness begin.

If a naturalist designed a flag it probably wouldn't look like this.

This is meant to be a mask for the Hairy Cemetery Nut to allow me to print the ground of the vandyke brown uniformly dark. I created inverses of the red on white ground in order to mask of the background of the Gingko Leaf grid images. Perhaps a side project coming around the corner.

"The Naturalists" Postcards Are In!

Next month's Member Curated Exhibition is "The Naturalists" featuring the work of Erin Holscher-Almazan, Diane Stemper and Francis Schanberger curated by the always insightful Bridgette Bogle.  The opening reception is scheduled for March 3rd, from 6 -9 pm at the Ohio Art League Gallery, 1552 North High Street, Columbus, Ohio 43201 and will run through April 1st.

Thank you Bridgette!

Gallery hours are: noon - 6pm, Monday - Wednesday and Thurs. -  Saturday noon - 8 pm.

You can contact OAL at 614.299.8225 or go to their website at: www.oal.org

two days of sun, two days of rain

This blog (such a nasty word) is, amongst other things, a Post-It note, bar napkin kind of thing for my working method and as of late it has been anthotype, anthotype, anthotype.

The big anthotype has gotten a good two days worth of sunshine on Friday and Saturday. The last two days have been cloudy and, especially today, wet! It should get about a full days worth of exposure on Wednesday but for now the tally is two days worth of backyard exposure for about 12 hours worth of direct sunlight.

and here's a picture of my hat to give you an idea of this morning's weather conditions.

at hand, at this scale, named after the name on the collar

Anthotype, pokeberry juice, pajama top (the piece will be named after the name on the collar).

Day 1: February 18th, 2011.

The "just leave it in the window" approach works fine for small tests. Now I have to care for my anthotypes. The next step is photogram based which means a big sheet of plexi and some sort of backing (unfortunately I only have cardboard at hand at this scale). Also, I have to put this out only on dry days and bring it back into the house at night.

Tune in to NOAA weather and please email me with any breaking weather reports. A little rain will wash away a good bit of last fall's pokeberry harvest - about 30 cc of juice.

Not Fugitive Enough

January 10 - February 17th window exposure.

Anthotype + sleepware = something positively resistant to light but for how long?


I think the most wonderful thing about creating anthotypes is the questions this process raises. It doesn't use any silver salts or iron. There is nothing precious about it, no gold or palladium involved and it doesn't use a negative. It needs a positive light resist and it forms an image by destroying a pigment that is unsheltered.


So the questions it raises are doubts. Is this a photograph in the traditional sense? How fugitive is the process? I believe that when defining the object know as a photograph, that there are unspoken parameters that viewer and collector expect to be part of the image.


Maybe the definition goes something like this...light has to be involved in the recording of the image i.e something like "the pencil of nature" for those of us insecure about are drawing skill. This could be light on a CCD or a piece of glass coated with collodian and silver nitrate. The unwritten parameters might be the image has to survive X amount of time. Perhaps X is the length of time it would take for a photographer to show the image to someone else in its original form once she / he thinks it is done. Perhaps this time needs to be extended or limited by some other constraint. What if we were to understand this unwritten quality to mean that the photograph must exist for a period of time equal to the time needed to create the image. Or perhaps it should last twice as long. Maybe we should wish it to last one rotation of the earth around the sun.


No matter how one defines a photograph, whether it exists only electronically (via screen) or on paper, there is an expectation that it will hang around long enough. The anthotype is one step removed from the MTV stencils applied to suntanning spring breakers I saw on screen those many years. It is also, strangely enough, in the same ballpark for longevity as the thermal paper prints from the Fisher Price camera I been re-acquainting myself with these last few months. How fugitive is the process? Not fugitive enough.

give winter the boot

Today is the opening reception for the Rosewood Art Center's annual Works on Paper exhibit. Bridgette's mixed media (cut paper, panel and water soluble oil) Poison Ivy piece (see her blog) and my Peninsular Boot Vandyke brown print made the cut. We are even mentioned as one of the two couples in the exhibit at the end of Pam Dillon's review.

Juried by Kristine Schramer, some of the artists in this 57 work exhibit are Erin Holzer Almazan, Sherree Emmons, Andrea Starkey, Alyson Eshelman, Ann Bain, Kalana Bartmess, Rebecca Carpenter, J. Austin Jennings, and Richard Malagorski. Come out and meet them between 2-4 pm at the gallery.

closer than they appear

Pictures in background are larger than they appear. Thank you Doug Taylor for the smart phone pic.

From the artists' talk today. Actually turned into a bit of an artists' round table (standing up) once the 3 o'clock bell rang and the Fort Hayes students fled the campus. 

...and from last week and last month, anthotype in the window pictures. Below, an image from February 4th. Compare it to the one posted on the January 10th blog. Once spring rolls around I am going to have to build a big printing frame to do the life sized sleep ware.

Closing Reception, ImageOhio 11

Last Thursday, Bridgette and I drove up to Kalamazoo to retrieve the work from the Greater Kalamazoo arts council. That show ended after about four months at the Western Michigan Cancer Center. It will be shipped off to Orange Coast College in a few weeks for a March exhibition. Next month in Columbus will also be the premier of the Naturalists (the work of Diane Stemper, Erin Holzer Almazan and Francis Schanberger) at the Ohio Art League gallery curated by Bridgette Bogle. I have no doubt the work will look fabulous but it took a lot of work and beautiful writing by Bridgette to bring us together and get the proposal approved. The exhibition also has been booked for September of 2012 at the Dayton Visual Arts Center.

There will be a closing reception for ImageOhio 11 this Friday at Fort Hayes in Columbus, OH. Justin Luna has scheduled the closing for 5-7pm this Friday, Feb. 11th. At 1:30 pm the same day there is a round of artist talks scheduled. Come by for the talks, stay for the closing, say "Hey!" and watch me unpin the "Roots with Dirt Clumps in Sixteen Pieces".

Columbus Dispatch Review for Portraits in Ohio at Ohio Arts Council's Riffe Gallery

Here's a link to Christopher Yates' review of "Here's Looking at You: Portraits in Ohio" at the Riffe Galley in Columbus. There is definitely a preference or bias for photography in the review and Yates begins with a quote by Richard Avedon.

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/arts/stories/2011/02/06/portraits-tell-stories-in-various-formats.html?sid=101

On another note, tonight the stars and planets aligned and I finished printing the Governor's Awards images. It should have been easy but I got the itch to tone the photographs in palladium and gold. Gold cools the warmness of the Vandyke brown in the midtones and highlights and palladium makes the ground a rich, dense, chocolate color.

no sharpening needed

Pictures so blurry that they cut through a tin can like an infomercial knife. From last year's Jeff Regensburger exhibit at DVAC...blurry images made with Patrick Mauk's damaged digital camera. How happy an accident is that...a point and shoot that shoots beautiful Bill Jacobson like images and nothing else?

snowpocalypse from the backyard

Yes. Dayton also got hit by snowpocalypse in the form of a terrible ice storm.

Then the winds kicked up last night. The sounds of branches and icicles striking the house as Bridgette and I tried to sleep.

Here are two pics from the backyard. Tuesday was bad. Today was better. All of the broken ice fallen from the trees actually provided traction for walking outside.

deconstructing the image

It is hard for me to grasp the scale of events unfolding in Egypt except through images. As a photographer and a photographic educator, I think the "Giving the Flowers to the Tank Driver" moment has already happened, namely the defacing of a large image of Mubarak.

The first image is from AP and the second via Reuters.