Altered Horizons 42

Altered Horizons 42 Robin Botie of Ithaca, new York, photoshops a fabricated landscape showing scattering in her effort to deal with depression and cope with loss.

Back to this thing called scattering. No, not what I did with my daughter’s ashes. Scattering, as in the white lightening up at the horizon, at the farthest point one can see. That place where everything seems to end. The vast, textureless, colorless, unknowable Beyond. It’s the phenomenon I tend to exaggerate in photo-shopping my fabricated landscapes.

When sunlight reaches the earth, it filters through the air before hitting the earth’s surface. On the path through the atmosphere, the lightwaves hit particles and then change direction and scatter. This scattering is what produces the blues and whites of the sky, the rosy red sunsets, and rainbows. All the beautiful mysteries I’m drawn to.

It hurt my head to read about all the details of electromagnetic radiation and the various types of scattering. I just wanted to capture the light dancing on the differing textures of my bedroom rug, a horse’s back, and a tea filter placed over a crystal saucer. And maybe the bright prospect of the unreachable.

 

Altered Horizons 42

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Altered Horizons 41

Altered Horizons 41 Robin Botie of Ithaca, new York, photoshops a fabricated landscape as part of her healing process.

In the middle of the vast woods at Connecticut Hill, New York’s largest wildlife management area, a horrible squawking-beeping made me jump. My cell phone, usually useless there, was suddenly lit up and alive.

“Emergency Alert. Snow Squall Warning until 10:45 AM EST. Sudden Whiteouts. Icy Roads. Slow Down!” I read aloud from the screen where a yellow triangle with an exclamation point was prominently displayed. I looked up at my hiking buddy.

“Let’s turn around,” she said, and we turned and bolted back out the way we’d come. Even my frail arthritic dog hightailed it over the icy trails with urgency as, very quickly, the snow started falling. In our haste to be out of there, I didn’t stop to photograph the heavy sky, the barely visible trail, the snowflakes coming down, first as minute dust-like particles and then growing bigger and faster. And more dense. Later, safely at home, in Photoshop I pasted together images of tumbling rocks and foamy residue from a sandy beach to remember the adventure.

Altered Horizons 41

 

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Altered Horizons 40

Altered Horizons 40 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a fabricated landscape, a bodyscape, from a human face.

Making a landscape from a human face. I thought I’d try this, at least once. So I took a negative image of an old classmate and pasted it onto a mackerel sky. My effort was going well enough until I tried to add scattering, the fine white haze that one sees at the horizon. That lightening up of the sky at the farthest point one can see, just before it disappears beyond the nearer more solid landform, has always drawn my focus. But I guess I should have highlighted it more subtly. My photography instructor, who knows all about capturing light and making light work, wasn’t buying it.

Altered Horizons 40

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Altered Horizons 39

Altered Horizons 39 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a fabricated landscape in dealing with seasonal affective disorder and loss.

Praying for sun. Although the winter sun in Upstate New York is cold and bleak, just a few hours of it can help melt huge snow mountains flanking both sides of doorways and driveways. All this snow would be depressing except that it sneaks up on you, falling silently from the sky either in fat fluffy flakes or tiny hard hail-pebbles. Either way it’s a surprisingly beautiful event even without the sun.

There was a mysterious dark disc seated in the middle of the pebbly rooftop at Cornell’s Heating Plant. For me, it immediately became a hardened gloomy sun in a sky dense with snowfall.

Altered Horizons 39

 

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Altered Horizons 38

Altered Horizons 38 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops fabricated landscapes in dealing with depression and coping with grief and loss.

In the next year or two I will move away from my house by Moonbeckon Pond. The thing I will miss most is my view of the sparkling pond right outside the large south-facing windows. A hundred times each day, my eyes rest on that sight; from the early morning light until the darkness of nighttime, the sight of that pond calms me. The place I will move to has no water features. The landscape consists of row upon row of attached houses and parking areas. When I no longer have my pond to gaze upon, in order to soothe my sore eyes, I will need to have created landscapes to hang on my new walls.

Although this scene was collaged in Photoshop using items of sentimental value—a foreground made up of several shots of my kids’ old dog-robot toy, a sky crafted from grillwork in Australia’s Old Melbourne Jail, a moon that is from the bottom of a bowl of my mother’s that’s been with me over half a century, and a frame pieced together from drainage strips on the doorstep of my current beloved home—this is not the landscape that will settle my soul.

Altered Horizons 38

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Altered Horizons 37

 

Altered Horizons 37 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a landscape fabricated from the back of a dog as she ponders the death of pets inherited by bereaved parents.

 

At Barton Valley Farm, dogs followed the photography students as we traipsed through the fields. I was trying to focus on the horses but this dog kept creeping into my view. I don’t know what kind of dog it was but it was very friendly and had great hair.

My own dog, Suki, is so old that the county clerk phoned me this year before mailing out the annual dog license renewal, “Is Suki still with us?”

Surprised by the call, I told her the dog I inherited from my daughter eleven years ago was indeed still here.

“Well, bless her little heart,” the clerk replied. And I do. Every day. Because I’ve seen, from others whose inherited dogs die, that when this dog goes it could be like losing my daughter all over again.

 

Altered Horizons 37

 

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