Watercolors No.6

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  It is often color that has surprised me in the working factory. Unlike the silk mill where I’m drawn to try images in monochrome, in the active brass mill spots and splashes of color seem to make the best images. Even as it is being taken apart they draw my camera.

My vigil continues, and today it rained most of the time while I was there while men were removing hydraulic pumps from the top of the extruder. The end is getting nearer. 

Now that I’m at home, and the sun is coming out, and I’m “developing” a few of the images I took, I’m regretting not getting a longer lens or my boots from the back of my car to explore close-up possibilities here, but the rain never stopped until after I left, and the car felt a long way off. What will tomorrow bring?

Viewed small this image has the effect of seeming clotted or blurred, but at proper scale details are all clear and it's easy to read the caution sign on the red post, and all of the writing stenciled on the side of the yellow crane at the back of the image.

Earlier “Watercolors”: http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/search?q=Watercolors

Watercolors No.9

To see other images in the "Watercolors" series, click here: http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/search?q=watercolors

Watercolors No.7

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Here is an October moment that composed a pond beside a friend’s cabin in Virginia. It has waited since 2012 for its moment on the blog. 

To see more of the “Watercolors” series, type, "watercolors" into the box in the upper left.

Hayloft

ANDREW WYETH: "I played alone, and wandered a great deal over the hills, painting watercolors that literally exploded, slapdash over my pages, and drew in pencil or pen and ink in a wild and undisciplined manner."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Karl Kuerner, known as Karl J. Kuerner III, met us Monday morning at the barn. I was glad to see him again. He is the grandson of Karl Kuerner, Sr., Andrew Wyeth's first, and arguably most important, muse.  Karl J., was there to feed animals and take care of morning chores. The barn was dark inside, and he helped us open whatever could be opened to let in light, and sometime early mid-morning was gone. He is an artist, and we'd hoped to stop by his studio to see what he was at work on, but a bad cold kept me away. 

Sometime later in the morning another man arrived and began shutting up the doors. He was somewhere in his eighties, a bit unsteady yet fit. It took awhile to explain that I was photographing the barns and needed to keep the doors open for the light. I explained we might be shooting for awhile, and tried to make clear "awhile" might be measured in multiple hours, not minutes. He was as hard of hearing as I am but had no aids; it took awhile to find the right wave length for communication, and I wasn't sure if we ever completely found it. When he left he said he'd be back later to close up; he was worried about children falling through the open hatches where hay was tossed.  So was I and also worried about me falling through a hatch or Gary, and the man's concern doubled my caution. 

He moved further into the barn and had a similar conversation with Gary, and I returned to shooting, a bit guilty that I might have rushed him on to get back to my image. It was perhaps a half hour later when he appeared with a book to show me, and I instantly realized my mistake.  The book was the book I'd bought at the Brandywine Museum on my last visit, the book of Karl J. Kuerner's paintings. This man was Karl Jr., the proud father of the artist and the proud son of the muse, here for his chores. Do I recall Karl the grandson saying his dad still ran the farm, did the haying? We were pleased to discover he would pose for us.  This was Karl Jr., our host.

Watercolors No.4, Prelude

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  The woods famously, lovely, dark and deep, have many trails to enter in. I've followed men's blazes, deer's tracks, and I've rolled logs and rocks to deeper recesses, but the way of water leads darkest and deepest.  A pond catching autumn color at my feet seemed a likely portal for photography, and through my lens I stood inside. While I stood alone, it was a grotto magnificently still, and when behind me the dogs finished clowning and went to the edge to sip, we were collaborators in the first trembling before the woods, like a bell, began to peal.

Watercolors

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Walking along the towpath of the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, it was hard to feel any of the energy that once surged along this artery. It was as still as a fossil, a byway of 19th century commerce, bushels of tobacco and cotton, barges of iron and coal preserved in a water-filled imprint, and it seemed to make clear how a society is a living organism and how barges on a canal can flow in packets over computer networks that catapult at light-speed through satellites in orbit around the earth. The web of communities and services that grew around the canal had all either fallen away or morphed into something new with an address in cyberspace, and the canal was left, a fit place to meditate on the stillness through which the sun was reflecting a clear, autumn afternoon.

Watercolors No.3

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

In the copper pools of autumn, thought 

accumulates and falling leaves, while 

the stream itself still surges and cascades

across old stones and windblasted hills.

What is there in us that is not of that crush?

Watercolors No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

On Dreaming

Mute leaves 

slip, slide, wink 

on shafts 

of orange light, 

bending seasons 

from a cool, blue destiny, 

before landing, 

freightless, 

commadored by insects, 

ships of passage 

through winter's mutinies 

ice, ooze

and the forgotten dreams

of pond-bottom. 

Here in the autumn pond

is the mirror of spring.

Watercolors No.8

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  Time to dream of spring.

Watercolors No.5, Resounding

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:   To feel the expressive capacity of texture, pattern, form and color alone, unallied to the concrete subject that stood before the actual lens; it is an effort natural to painting and antithetical to photography.