[ Lost in the Landscape ]

art from the garden

I started this blog because I was feel­ing that I was enter­ing a bit of an imposed artis­tic hia­tus. Kodak had stopped pro­duc­ing the spe­cial­ized film I used for most of my pho­tog­ra­phy, and I’d bought the last of the old stock of it that peo­ple had to sell on eBay.

I enjoy gar­den­ing at least as much as art-making. Also, the idea of a gar­den plays with the same kinds of ideas that I was inter­ested in when I did my art, stuff like the edges between human cul­ture and nature, and the envi­ron­men­tal costs of human habi­ta­tion. The idea of a gar­den blog seemed like it could keep me think­ing about some ideas that inter­ested me. And it might push the some of the same cre­ative but­tons that pho­tog­ra­phy did.

(Left: James SOE NYUN. Calla Lily Dis­sec­tion II, 1997. Pig­ment print, ca. 13 x 19 inches.)

Maybe the blog has func­tioned too well to keep me out of the stu­dio. But I’ve been reprint­ing at some of the garden-based pho­tog­ra­phy I did in the past and see­ing how it might point in new directions.

Recently I was invited to show of my older work at a small gallery in Escon­dido, in north­ern San Diego County. The show is Eye­sight is Insight / Art + Sci­ence, and is curated by Ruth West and Sarach Attwood. The show opened yes­ter­day, and remains up through July 3 at the Escon­dido Arts Part­ner­ship Munic­i­pal Gallery. These are a cou­ple of the works in the show, images from my Destruc­tive Test­ing Series, a small group of works where I use plant mate­ri­als from the gar­den in lit­tle sci­ence experiments.

(Left: James SOE NYUN. Fig Leaf Flam­ma­bil­ity Test 6b, 2000. Pig­ment print, ca. 19 x 15 3/4 inches.)

In addi­tion to reprint­ing some fo the older work, I’ve actu­ally been doing a lit­tle bit of work look­ing at gar­den­ing. I’ll share some of it here once I get to some­thing I’m will­ing to show the world.

In the mean­time, I’m happy to share some of this older work. Stop by the show if you’re in the headed for Escondido!

June 12 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • my garden • photography | | 4 Comments »

plants in black and white

In a world where color pho­tographs are easy to come by it can be refresh­ing to stand back and look at images where the color has been sim­pli­fied down to tones of black, white and gray.

Edwin Hale Lin­coln (1848–1938) com­piled his mas­sive series, Wild­flow­ers of New Eng­land, Pho­tographed from Nature, in the early part of the 20th cen­tury. The pho­tos are warm-toned plat­inum prints where the plants form dec­o­ra­tive pat­terns. You can tell that the pho­tog­ra­pher was asso­ci­ated with the Arts and Crafts move­ment, and many of the pho­tos could serve as tem­plates for carved dec­o­ra­tions on a piece of furniture.

Left: Edwin Hale Lin­coln. Con­volvu­lus Sep­tium, Hedge Bindweed, Morning-Glory, plate 124 from Wild­flow­ers of New Eng­land, Pho­tographed from Nature, Vol­ume V, 1904. [ photo from the de Young Museum, which had an exhi­bi­tion on Lin­coln last year ]

Left: Edwin Hale Lin­coln. Acorus Cala­mus, Flag-Root, Sweet Flag, Calamus-Root, 1914. [ image from Alan Klotz Gallery, which will be fea­tur­ing Lincoln’s work in a show that runs from May 7th to July 2nd ]

Dif­fer­ent from Lincoln’s work are the later pho­tographs of Karl Bloss­feldt (1865–1932). His 1928 Urfor­men der Kunst, pub­lished in the 1929 Eng­lish edi­tion, Art Forms in Nature, fea­tures 120 beau­ti­fully grainy pho­togravures. (Soul­catcher Stu­dio has the entire vol­ume online.) Bloss­feldt fol­lowed up the book with a sec­ond vol­ume in 1932.

Bloss­feldt, like Lin­coln, came out of an arts and crafts ori­en­ta­tion, in his case, that of orna­men­tal met­al­work. But Bloss­feldt moved in closer to his plants, often show­ing them in extreme mag­ni­fi­ca­tion. He didn’t claim to be a sci­en­tist, and instead was look­ing at nature for the ulti­mate inspi­ra­tion for human art.

(BTW, If you hap­pen upon reruns of the TV show Will and Grace, take a look at Will’s apart­ment, and you’ll see sev­eral framed Bloss­feldts prints on the set.)

Karl Bloss­feldt. San­guisorba, swal­low­wort, from Urfor­men der Kunst, 1928. [ image from the Wiki­me­dia Com­mons ]

Karl Bloss­feldt. Monks­hood, from Urfor­men der Kunst, 1928. [ image from the Wiki­me­dia Com­mons ]

But that’s barely scratch­ing the sur­face. Check out Edward Weston’s stun­ning, almost lewd Cab­bage Leaf. Or Imo­gen Cunningham’s Mag­no­lia. Or one of Robert Mapplethorpe’s calla lilies.

Or next time you go out into your gar­den to pho­to­graph a plant, put your cam­era in black in white mode, and notice the things you start to pay atten­tion to once the color isn’t there as a distraction…

May 10 2009 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: Edwin Hale Lincoln • Karl BLossfeldt | 6 Comments »

camera oops

Have you ever made a mis­take while using a cam­era and ended up lik­ing the “bad” photo best?

I had bor­rowed John’s dig­i­tal point and shoot and had aimed the thing at one of the local native plants, a bloom­ing bush poppy, Den­drome­con rigida. The cam­era took for­ever to focus, and I thought it’d done its thing. But the flash went off as I was mov­ing to put the cam­era back in my pocket.

The result­ing photo com­bines a blurred ren­di­tion of the plant and mulch with just a lit­tle bit of sub­ject mat­ter frozen in place by the flash. It’s noth­ing you’d use to iden­tify the plant, but I like it as a photo…

April 26 2009 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: bush poppy • Dendromecon rigida • photographic mistakes | 7 Comments »

picture this photo contest

Gar­den­ing Gone Wild is host­ing a photo con­test for the best image of native plants in a gar­den set­ting. Wan­der down to the links in the com­ments on their post to see all the excel­lent ways peo­ple use natives in their gardens.

It’s hard for me sit some­thing like this out, so below are my three entries, pho­tos taken in my gar­den over the last cou­ple of months. (As usual, click to see the larger images.)

I’ve already shared the first two on these pages, so for­give me for repris­ing them. These are of clumps of blue-eyed grass (Sisy­rinchium bel­lum) in a totally assorted plant­ing, mix­ing the natives with veg­gies (Red Win­ter red Russ­ian kale, beets, red– and orange-stemmed chard) orna­men­tals (heliotrope, geum and sages) and an herb (cat­mint). The plant­ing requires an aver­age amount of water­ing to keep every­body happy, but it shows how food plants and natives can eas­ily coex­ist with more gar­de­nesque selections.

(“Gardenesque”–how I love that word. No, I didn’t make it up. I have Noel Kings­bury (with Piet Oudolf) to thank for using it in Design­ing with Plants. He blogs, too!)

The first is a closeup of the native, the sec­ond shows the same bed three weeks later, after the geum started to flower.

The third photo pic­tures a foun­da­tion plant­ing fea­tur­ing one of the Cal­i­for­nia native rushes, Jun­cus patens. I have this thing for spikey, archi­tec­tural plants, and this one ful­fills my needs nicely. Most rushes are crea­tures of wet zones. How­ever, J. patens is one of the most drought-tolerant. These plants are located in the drip line for water off the roof, and they can make it through the sum­mer with min­i­mal added irrigation.

April 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: blue-eyed grass • Juncus patens • native plants • Sisyrinchium bellum | 8 Comments »

the view from the top

It’s spring, and the wild­flow­ers wait for no one. I’ve been for­sak­ing gar­den­ing and home projects and blog­ging (gasp!) a bit to check out some of the local open spaces. Here’s a panorama of part of the view from the top of For­tuna Mount­ian, at 1,243 feet the sec­ond high­est “peak” in the San Diego city lim­its. (Click the image to enlarge.)

This peak burned on Octo­ber 26, 2003 dur­ing the county’s big Cedar Fire. Revis­it­ing the area is a great les­son to see how things recover from a major fire, either by resprout­ing from the roots or reestab­lish­ing them­selves by seed. There are still plenty of dead branches pok­ing up towards the sky, but there’s also a huge amount of green. And these big, gor­geous rocks didn’t hold on to their scorch marks for long. (Don’t you just love rocks in a land­scape, either in the wilds or in a garden?)

Many of the plants and flow­ers aren’t ones you’ll find even in native plant gar­dens, but sev­eral have passed the “garden-worthy” test. In the sec­ond frame from the left above, you’ll see a bloom spike of the sting­ing lupine, Lupi­nus hir­sutis­simus, sort of an awful name for a beau­ti­ful plant.

While I haven’t seen plants of this annual species offered for sale, sev­eral online sources do list seeds, includ­ing S&S Seeds, and Seed­hunt.

Also on the sum­mit were two other plants that are used fairly fre­quently in native gar­dens: lau­rel sumac (Mal­osma lau­rina) and mis­sion man­zanita (Xylo­coc­cus bicolor), both of them even­tu­ally form­ing large, inter­est­ing shrubs.

I’ll be shar­ing more bits and pieces of the trips as I get them more organized.

April 03 2009 | Categories: landscape • photography | Tags: Fortuna Mountain • Mission Trails Regional Park • San Diego | 2 Comments »

robie house planters

On my recent Chicago visit I had the chance to stop by Frank Lloyd Wright’s land­mark 1909–1911 Robie House in the Hyde Park neigh­bor­hood. Unfor­tu­nately the foun­da­tion that runs it was in the mid­dle of a major ren­o­va­tion inside. Even through we were on an archi­tec­tural tour the only way to view the inte­rior on this day was stand out­side and peer inside through the stained glass windows.

Ooh… (Look­ing inside, off the sec­ond story porch into the nearly fin­ished space…)

Uhhh… (The ground floor, still in the throes of renovation…)

Once we got that out of our sys­tem we had to con­cen­trate on the exte­rior of the build­ing and the gar­dens. I could think of worse things to have to do.

A pair of side gates opens up to an auto court with a small gar­den on the side. It was win­ter and the plant­i­ngs weren’t any too spec­tac­u­lar this time of year, but the hard­scape details were worth a close look.

The thin, wide bricks of the house and gar­den walls all fea­ture this neat lit­tle detail: The mor­tar between the courses is the typ­i­cal light mor­tar color, but the hor­i­zon­tal spaces between the bricks uses a red-colored mor­tar. The effect is that you notice hor­i­zon­tal bands and not the indi­vid­ual bricks. The house swoops side­ways towards the hori­zon, and the walls do the same, cel­e­brat­ing the ever-expanding hor­i­zon­tal prairie that makes up the Midwest.

Sev­eral of the cor­ners of the porches fea­ture these styl­ized urns. Instead of the chubby Roman mod­els, Wright has designed them to swoop side­ways just like the house and walls do.

And there are sev­eral of these planters that explode with color in the sum­mer. But now…well, not so green. The story goes that Wright designed these planters with­out drainage–something that comes as no sur­prise from an archi­tect who was obsessed with form over func­tion and noto­ri­ous for cre­at­ing houses with leaky roofs and sus­pended ter­races that sagged under their own weight.

As I reviewed the pho­tos from the Robie House, though, there’s one thing that starts to gnaw on me. Though it doesn’t look huge, it’s still some­thing like 9000 square feet if you count the out­door ter­races. All the out­door spaces seemed squeezed in there. Was this a space-intensive urban use of a small lot? Or was it a hundred-year-old McMan­sion? Even if that, it’s pretty cool as McMan­sions go…

February 28 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • landscape design • photography • places | Tags: architecture • brick • Chicago • concrete • Frank Lloyd Wright • garden walls • planters • Robie House • walls | 8 Comments »

wordless wednesday: soft-focus heliotrope

February 18 2009 | Categories: my garden • photography | Tags: heliotrope • Heliotropium arborescens • Wordless Wednesday | 6 Comments »

my first wordless wednesday: in macro

[ African daisy (Arc­to­tis x ‘Magenta’), cur­rently in bloom… ]

February 04 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden • photography | Tags: African daisy • arctotis • Arctotis Magenta • macro photography | 4 Comments »

balboa park’s desert garden

Jan­u­ary can be an amaz­ing month for suc­cu­lents and other desert plants. Many aloes and agaves explode into bloom, and plants with ephemeral foliage are green with leaves in ways you don’t often see them.

San Diego’s Bal­boa Park houses one of the prime local col­lec­tion of cacti, suc­cu­lents and other desert dwellers from around the world. The Desert Gar­den, the larger of its two suc­cu­lent gar­dens, was estab­lished in 1976, but many of the plants are senior cit­i­zens much older than the age of the garden.

Aloes star in its Jan­u­ary land­scape, with red and orange torches of flow­ers that dou­ble as hum­ming­bird magnets.

And shown here, lurk­ing in the shad­ows, is one of the local hum­ming­birds, stak­ing its territory.

Among the big, mature spec­i­mens are sev­eral dragon trees, Dra­caena draco. In this first photo, on the near trunk, you can see a red­dish patch where the plant’s red sap has dried. When cut, these plants ooze a fluid that in some Euro­pean leg­ends was pur­ported to be dragon’s blood, hence the plant’s name (draco = dragon).

This is a pub­lic gar­den, and so it’s sub­ject to fund­ing glitches and bat­tles over civic pri­or­i­ties. I’d con­sider the gar­den to be in great con­di­tion con­sid­er­ing those limitations.

One thing I would have loved to have seen, though, would be more plant labels. I encoun­tered so many inter­est­ing species, but very few of them had name tags. I have this thing about need­ing to know the name of a plant–Call me com­pul­sive. But the lack of labels drove me crazy. I real­ize, how­ever, that tags don’t come cheap. And in a wide-open pub­lic gar­den, labels can walk away with pieces of suc­cu­lents in the hands of evil plant addicts.

One of the plants that was labeled was this Natal Bot­tle­brush, Greyia suther­landii. A bit scrappy-looking as a plant, but what great flowers!

Also labeled was the Mada­gas­car ocotillo, Allu­au­dia pro­cera. I loved the spi­ral pat­tern­ing of its spines.

Another prob­lem with this being a pub­lic gar­den is that there are quite a few spec­i­mens where people’s temp­ta­tions to carve their ini­tials in the plant life got the bet­ter of them. This euphor­bia was scarred many times over. But that wasn’t going to stop it from blooming.

After vis­it­ing the gar­den I was sur­prised by how many shots I’d racked up in the cam­era. And for some rea­son, the major­ity of them were ver­ti­cals. Is there some­thing about succulents–particularly the upright-growing kinds that mimic the way a human stands–that scream out for pho­tograph­ing them in an upright orientation?

Some yuc­cas, I think, with spent bloom stems.

Boo­jum trees, Fouquieria colum­naris, native to Baja Cal­i­for­nia. This plant is in the same genus as the Cal­i­for­nia desert’s spec­tac­u­lar ocotillo, which inter­est­ingly isn’t related to the Madas­car ocotillo, above.

Aloes and kalan­choes in bloom.

The main gar­den is a flat, easy stroll over wide decom­posed gran­ite path­ways. As part of a recent expan­sion, the gar­den now also includes this switch­back down into Florida Canyon, also part of Bal­boa Park. The plants along the descent are still young, but should look spec­tac­u­lar in a decade or so.

Not every­one in the world loves cac­tus and suc­cu­lents. They might point to the defen­sive spines many of the plants have, and they might say the sculp­tural shapes of the plants don’t look soft and cozy like leafy shrubs or fra­grant roses. Next to the Desert Gar­den is Bal­boa Park’s rose gar­den. Dur­ing spring­time, thirty sec­onds of walk­ing would take you from the world of cac­tus and suc­cu­lents to a gar­den manic with flow­ers and heavy with the aroma of roses. But on this bright Jan­u­ary day, the adja­cent roses were pruned down to naked stems and pierc­ing thorns. It was the cac­tus and suc­cu­lents that looked warm and welcoming.

The Desert Gar­den is located across Park Boule­vard from the Nat­ural His­tory Museum on Bal­boa Park’s museum row. The gar­den has no walls, no entry fee, and is open 24/7, 365 days of the year.

If the 2.5 acres of the Desert Gar­den isn’t enough of a cac­tus and suc­cu­lent fix, cross Park Boule­vard and take a stroll over to the Bal­boa Park Club, maybe ten min­utes on foot, and take in the parks orig­i­nal 1935 cac­tus gar­den, which, accord­ing to the park’s web­site, was estab­lished “under the direc­tion of [San Diego gar­den­ing leg­end] Kate Ses­sions for the 1935 Cal­i­for­nia Pacific Inter­na­tional Expo­si­tion.” There you’ll find “some of the largest cac­tus and suc­cu­lent spec­i­mens in the Park,” along with a nice col­lec­tion of proteas.

January 11 2009 | Categories: gardening • photography • places • plant profiles | Tags: Balboa Park • Balboa Park Desert Garden • cacti • desert plants • drought-tolerant landscaping • in bloom • succulents | 3 Comments »

some of my favorite photographs

My visit after Christ­mas to the Getty Cen­ter had as its main des­ti­na­tion an exhibit of pho­tographs by Car­leton Watkins.

Watkins worked all over the West Coast, and was the first per­son to develop an impor­tant body of work on Yosemite. The show con­tained beau­ti­fully pre­served exam­ples of his pho­tographs, includ­ing a few that rank up there among my all-time favorite pho­tographs ever taken.

Car­leton Watkins: El Cap­i­tan, 1860s [ Library of Con­gress ]

More than one per­son has argued that Watkins is the first impor­tant artist to come out of Cal­i­for­nia, regard­less of medium, and I would not argue that point. There’s a poise and still­ness to the work. The images seem to float in their own time and space that extends to infinity.

Even after an hour in a crowded series of gal­leries, the work left me with a sense of still­ness that I still feel, over a week later. (The fact that I’m still on vaca­tion also prob­a­bly has some­thing to do with it…)

Car­leton Watkins: First View of the Yosemite Val­ley from the Mari­posa Trailca. 1866.

In the image to the left, El Cap­i­tan, the light-colored mass of gran­ite to the dis­tance in the left, bal­ances ele­gantly with the bulk of the nearer hill­side on the right. It’s an amaz­ingly for­mal, mod­ern image. I don’t know of any draw­ing, paint­ing or other pho­to­graph from up to this time that looks any­thing like it.

(This is one of two ver­sions of this image taken at the same time from the same van­tage point. I pre­fer the other ver­sion of this image, which is in the Getty show. I wasn’t able to find any­thing on the web to bor­row of either ver­sion, so this quick shot out of one of my books that at least gives you an idea of the image.)

Car­leton Watkins: Cape Horn, Colum­bia River, 1867 [ National Gallery of Art ]

I had a con­ver­sa­tion with Roy Flukinger, Cura­tor of Pho­tog­ra­phy & Film at the Harry Ran­som Human­i­ties Research Cen­ter at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin, about nine­teenth cen­tury land­scape pho­tographs. He spoke of a “tran­sub­stan­ti­a­tion” of mat­ter that occurs in many of them, where the long expo­sures and pho­to­graphic tech­niques ren­dered water, air and land to be almost equiv­a­lent mate­ri­als. In the image above, the water and sky and dis­tant moun­tains merge into each other. The cliffs to the right seem to float over the water. At the same time, they seem to fit into the rocks to the left like a key fits into a lock, or the way the shape of Africa reaches across the Atlantic to nes­tle into the empty space of the Caribbean on a map.

Car­leton Watkins: Cape Horn near Celilo, 1867 [ Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum of Art ]

The quiet­ness and sense of infi­nite space in this one is phe­nom­e­nal. If your blood pres­sure doesn’t drop ten points after view­ing this image, noth­ing will bring it down!

Dia­logue Among Giants: Car­leton Watkins and the Rise of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Cal­i­for­nia runs until March 1.

January 03 2009 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • places | Tags: albumin prints • Carleton Watkins • Columbia River • J. Paul Getty Museum • landscape photography • Washington (State) • Yosemite | No Comments »