Tag Archives: coping with loss

Altered Horizons 68

Altered Horizons 68 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops fabricated landscapes to deal with depression and loss.

Altered Horizons. Due to loss ,everything in my life has been altered, changed to some different reality. Not by choice. After being crushed by grief for so long, it is comforting to create small worlds and set horizon lines that reflect my eye level and personal physical position in the scene. In creating these fabricated landscapes, I can choose and control. I can build stability and balance, if only on my computer screen.

This shot was taken standing on the shores of Kezar Lake at Quisisana Resort in Maine. In Photoshop I changed the colors, and then flipped the image upside down so the water became hills, and the sandy beach turned into a sky. Burning the color from a circular patch in the “sky,” I created a full moon.

Altered Horizons 68

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Altered Horizons 60

Altered Horizons 60 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops fabricated landscapes in her therapeutic photography, dealing with depression and coping with grief.

The algae I pull from the pond almost daily is heavy and saturated. It drops from my rake in thick wooly sheets that often contain tiny snails or squirming baby turtles that wriggle their way back into the water before I can photograph them. The heavy dumped algae, drained of its water, seems to drink up the light. It is such a contrast to the peony with its soft, delicate petals reflecting the sunlight and fluttering slightly in the air. To me it’s like the difference between life and death, elation and depression, a luminous moon and a messy muddy swamp.

In Photoshop I combine algae and peonies over and over again in fabricated landscapes.

 

Altered Horizons 60

 

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Altered Horizons 44

Altered Horizons 44 Robin Botie of ithaca, new York, photoshops a fabricated landscape thinking of war-torn cities in Ukraine.

In my folder of unused images I found a shot of an old piece of equipment the function of which remains a mystery to me. It had reminded me of the innards of a piano when I originally came across it. But recently, all I can see in it are the treads of armored tanks ominously rolling down the streets of war-torn Ukrainian cities. In Photoshop I converted a quilt-square of dotted red fabric into a gray sky where snow falls gently but consistently over a ravaged landscape.

Altered Horizons 44

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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 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 34

Altered Horizons 34 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, uses Photoshop to create a landscape of junk to illustrate the need for decluttering.

It’s Decluttering Time again: time to unload my home of accumulated stuff. The longer I live, the more I shop, and inherit, and acquire. It piles up quickly, unnoticeable at first as the newly cleared closets and shelves easily accommodate incoming treasure. Every third or fourth winter though, when the ice and cold keep me in the house for long stretches of time, I start noticing how the stuff starts dripping from every crammed corner. Some folks do an annual Spring Cleaning. But once I begin noticing this excessive acquisition of possessions, even in the harshest, most inconvenient and dismal season, I have to purge the place—pronto—before it can bury me.

At Upstate Shredding in Owego, NY, there were different landscapes everywhere I looked as mountains of sorted junk were being shredded, cleaned and sold to foundries and mills all around the world, to be reprocessed and made into new products. More stuff.

Altered Horizons 34

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