Tag Archives: fabricated landscape

Altered Horizons 47

Altered Horizons 47 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops fabricated landscapes in dealing with depression and coping with change.

Well over half a century ago my kindergarten teacher told my mother I was talented. So began my career in art. By the 3rd grade, I was well established as a “good artist” in NYC PS94, and they gave me an easel in the back of the packed classroom where I could paint and draw all day during lessons. For years I painted and drew, and later sewed, my way through social studies reports, science projects, college term papers, and a master’s thesis. Art was a major part of my identity. Then, one day I quit. I couldn’t stand to even go near pencils or paints. People occasionally expected handcrafted cards or gifts, and I struggled through the process of “doing art” for them. Until I discovered I could “paint” with my photographs in Photoshop.

Here I’ve painted a seascape using a photo of the Yarra River in Melbourne, Australia, taken after tossing some of my daughter’s ashes into it. The frothy-looking land at the horizon line is the bubbly edge of an incoming tide at a beach where I attended family reunions in Sanibel, Florida. The sky is taken from an image of a sandy riverbank in Maryland where I rented a cottage with a friend during the first COVID Christmas. And the sun is my favorite gold pendant, enlarged, inverted and de-saturated in Photoshop.

When I “paint” in Photoshop I get lost in the process. Using images that pull at my heart and history, I now “do art” with a similar drive to what I had when I was young.

Altered Horizons 47

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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 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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