Most days now you can find me in my tiny boat on the pond, pulling out pondweed and piling it on the banks. It’s an endless chore but a calming one. And I’m grateful for it, knowing that one day I will not have the pond or the boat or the energy to do this.
If you turn this photo upside down you will see my pond so thick with weeds that the reflections of the nearby trees are nearly obliterated.
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For my fabricated landscape this week I challenged myself to turn the trunk of a shagbark hickory tree into an ocean. The sky I added above was taken from a photo of my pond during a rainstorm. In order to get the hazy light-scattering effect at the horizon line, I turned the photo of the rain-dappled pond upside down and whitened the edge where the sea meets the sky. This lightening allows for a peaceful calming effect. The texture, however, makes for an edgy kind of calm, one that could easily erupt into stormy chaos.
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In this fabricated landscape, a smooth rock from my garden hovers over a shagbark hickory tree that I flipped to its side in Photoshop, to create a shaggy windswept field. For me, combining scratchy and slick textures is even more engaging than working with colors. But I wonder, if I add blues, can I change this field into an ocean? This will be a small adventure for me on some rainy afternoon when, immersed in Photoshop, I will be distracted from feeling the hollowness in my heart.
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For months my bags have been packed, ready for me to go flying off to some beautiful bright place. It seems like ages since I last flew. But I remember flying above Ithaca, watching the ground below as it stretched out endlessly and disappeared into the hazy horizon. That’s what I was thinking about when I fabricated this landscape. After inverting my favorite photo of an allium seed head into a negative image, I set it over a shot of my driveway that, on an early morning in April, was riddled with the remains of the last snowfall of the season.
The hills around home are greening up now. It’s getting harder to imagine ever wanting to leave here. Maybe next winter. Maybe I’ll fly away before the first snow of the season, before I grab up the camera and head for the driveway to photograph the new day’s pattern of white patches, believing it’s beautiful.
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It was raining for days and days. Cooped up alone at home, I felt isolated and depressed. And frustrated because I had to delay my plan to focus on photographing bodies of water. I’d been hoping to shoot my pond and Cayuga Lake downtown, maybe Bullhead Pond up in Connecticut Hill. Instead, hunkering down in the house with mugs of hot chocolate, I rummaged through the kitchen and found a vase that reflected light like a rippled stream. In the high shelves where rarely used serving pieces lie in wait, there appeared a glass platter that could pick up the tiniest bit of light in the dim. In Photoshop, I paired these images to produce the fabricated landscape of the week.
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Making borders. Framing. For a long time I wondered why it was so satisfying to enclose each of my fabricated landscapes in a decorative border. My work just doesn’t feel done until I’ve framed it. Sometimes I photograph existing picture frames and then transpose their images into negatives in Photoshop, changing the colors and enhancing the shadows and highlights. Often I’ll start a frame from scratch, finding an interesting tooled edge or naturally defined edge on something and then I’ll stretch it out and piece it together, mitering the ends into four sides. Occasionally I’ll superimpose a floral or grassy graphic on the pieces. Surrounding my pictures is like securely wrapping them up into cozy nests. It’s like marking each newly composed place separate from the rest of the world.
The land and sky here is from the frothy edge of a wave washing up on a sandy shore, turned upside down and inverted to its negative in Photoshop. The moon is drawn from the image of an old tarnished Celtic knot pendant that I lightened and highlighted.
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