Petrograph Gallery

2012-01-17T09:26:00.000-08:00

GRAND CANYON:

AfterImage

Post 17

It's finally happened: I've caught up to myself in real time. The work and thoughts I'm posting are concurrent with the work and thoughts I'm doing.

Last year this time I was preparing to go to the Grand Canyon as the January/February Artist in Residence. It was daunting and exciting and thrilling and frightening. Who knew I'd come away with the earth's shadows, and print them on Atlantic Ocean beach pebbles. Not me...

I was at the Canyon from 25 January to 15 February, 2011. So to honor that one-year anniversary, I will post one or two finished pieces of artwork sometime in that period. First, I have to do the finishing part...When I put new work up, I'll make an announcement on Facebook. And then that will conclude this series, which began (oh, to have picked a different date!) 11 September, 2011.

For now, I leave you with an image of the studio in the beautiful artist's apartment above Verkamp's Visitors Center...

And also a word of thanks to Rene Westbrook and the South Rim Artists in Residence Program at the Canyon. I'd hoped I could live up to the long tradition of artists who've lived and worked at the Grand Canyon, and be "inspired" while I was there. But my work turned out not to be the issue at all. The important thing was just being there, to receive the baton from the artist before me and pass it to the one that followed, keeping the chain of human wonder strong and unbroken. What an honor to be part of it. Wonder is where both stewardship and art come from. It's the wonder that matters.

2012-01-09T06:16:00.000-08:00

GRAND CANYON:

AfterImage Series

Post 16

Welcome to the BLACK AND WHITE post.

Up until I went to the Canyon I'd only shot petrographs in black and white, and did all the printing myself in the darkroom. (Not the developing; I hate developing. I have to thank Iris Photo, in downtown Northampton, for that.) But the Canyon residency inspired me to acquire an on-sale Olympus DSLR camera, which I've grown to love like a limb. There was so much nuanced color in the ashes, grasses, sand, mud, and sea shots that I fell in love with color, and took most of the AfterImage Series in it.

That said...I also shot black and white film with my ancient Minolta SLR, and this is the post of those images. I've yet to print any large-scale in the darkroom, but hope to sometime this spring--after I quit writing this blog! (They'll be posted eventually...)

So here's a gallery of black and white work of the AfterImage pebbles, printed with Grand Canyon shadows.

AfterImage undone by the tide

Canyon Clock--telling time sequentially through shadows--on Jasper Beach, Maine

I'm thinking of calling this "Ancestry." Does that resonate with anyone?

The World Clock: Time, Inundated

Stages of the World Clock

The AfterImage in ashes

AfterImages in Black and White Light: Dawn, Noon, Dusk

Whatever comes of this in the final, printed version, it probably won't look like this. I'm just messing around with my favorite, arrow-shaped shadow, playing with shapes, textures, ideas. If anyone has any thoughts, good or bad, don't hesitate to let me know!

Addendum, 13 Jan. 2012: I neglected to say when I originally put up this post that my idea for creating pebble collages came from my friend Annette Kling, from Mannheim, Germany. When Annette was visiting us in November she played around with the black and white pebble photos and created some cool designs...an idea that hadn't really occurred to me. So I promised I'd credit her on the blog, and then forgot!! So now I am...Thanks, Annette!

2011-12-28T14:00:00.000-08:00

GRAND CANYON;

AfterImage Series

Post 15

In real time, I'm writing this poised between Christmas 2011 and New Year's 2012: HAPPY HOLIDAYS, bloggers.

In blog time, it's still summer, and I'm in Harrington, Maine, working on installations of palm-size petrograph beach pebbles, printed with images of immense shadows thrown by rock formations onto the walls of the Grand Canyon.

In my previous post I showed images of the pebbles against a sea grass backdrop. Those photos were taken on the property of our rental house, which sat at the confluence of a tidal inlet and a bay. This group, shot on a sandy beach and at the tideline itself, was taken at the Petit Manan Wildlife Reserve in Millbridge, Maine. Getting to the refuge involved a 20 min. ride from our house to the parking lot, in the midst of blueberry barrens, and then a half-hour walk across granite outcrops and through a scrub forest to the beach.

Lichen on the hike to the beach; and below, images of the beach that awaited

To see a set of semi-abstract photos of the beach, look to the lefthand column under "Normal Photos," and click on the image under "Normal But Abstract."

When I first envisioned this series, back in the artist in residence's living room at the Grand Canyon, I imagined taking the pebble shots at the beach, in sand and underwater. It made the most sense to me; I liked the idea of markers of hours--the Canyon shadows--brought to the beach where they would summon aeons--a memory of what the Canyon once was.

Here are some of the shots:

The above AfterImage shots were taken, respectively, in wet sand at the sea's edge and dry sand at the beach's perimeter; same with the ones below. In between the top shots is an AfterImage progression from the dry perimeter into the waves themselves.

And these are some of a the water shots...

I'm not particularly happy with the compilation below, but it gives a sense of progression, at least. I'll work on it...(These are all just working shots; I've really no idea yet what the finished work will look like...)

The pebble shot below was taken at Jasper Beach, an all-pebble beach near Machias, Maine. An snapshot of the beach follows...

2011-12-19T15:30:00.000-08:00

GRAND CANYON:

AfterImage Series

Post 14

At the end of July Marguerite and I rented a 200 year-old house in Harrington, Maine. Here's the house:

And here's the view:

And here's our dog, Tenby--then 14 and a half--enjoying herself in the seagrass (her 15th birthday is on January 11th)

This is where I got the idea of including grass as one of the backdrops for the pebble designs. It would legitimately represent a phase of the Canyon's development--when the area was covered in shallow seas, fringed with sea grasses, which later became an organic contribution to the limestone--as well as add color and texture to the photos. I thank the dog for the suggestion.

It wasn't so bad photographing the pebbles in sea grass during the day. Biting horseflies the size of small planes buzzed around, but I could more or less swat them away. The dusk shots, however, were a bloody a nightmare. Mosquitos swarmed, literally turning the sleeve of my neon-red rain jacket black, they were so dense, so that I had to cover myself head to toe. Still they swarmed around my face and I thought I'd go mad from the buzzing. That's why there aren't more twilight shots...Here are some:

World Clock, Twilight, Marsh Grass

After Image Twilight, Marsh Grass

And by day:

Canyon Clock, Marsh Grass

AfterImage, Marsh Grass

Finally, here are some of the petrograph pebbles, taken in the marsh grass, which incorporate semi-abstract shots of the landscape in which they were photographed:

We found the work of a couple of artists we really liked while we were in Harrington. Here are 2 of them:

Obadiah Bourne Buell: http://bournedesigns.info/granitegarden.html, and Philip Frey: www.philipfrey.com

Have a look...

2011-12-11T12:25:00.000-08:00

GRAND CANYON:

AfterImage Series

Post 13

In this post I'm going to write about ashes. Fireplace ashes, to be specific, which means the ashes of oak trees from my childhood home in New Jersey, chopped by my father and brought to Massachusetts for Marguerite and me to burn.

These images are quick mock-ups of potential, finished work that I made using the "light table" feature of Mac's Aperture program (that's why they have those little white boxes in the lower righthand corners). Each one is composed of individual shots of petrograph designs, created using the Grand Canyon shadow pebbles.

I shot these outside in my backyard in July. I filled a large Pyrex baking dish with fireplace ashes and then arranged the pebbles in the ashes according to different designs. The different colors are achieved entirely from shooting the pebbles at different times of day: dawn (God help me), noon, late afternoon, and dusk, just before dark. The line of AfterImages was shot at dawn, around 8am, noon, 5pm, 8pm, and 8:45pm.

The image below is the World Clock Series--each pebble's shadow representing the same moment at the Grand Canyon, La Paz, Bolivia, Tasiilaq, Greenland, and Cardiff, Wales--shot, clockwise, at dawn, noon, 5:30pm, and 8:30pm.

I created designs based on the World Clock Series, the Canyon Sundial Series, the AfterImage shape, and several abstract patterns. It was fun but as always, there was a learning curve. I took me awhile to realize I was shooting some of the pebbles upside down, so I had to make a big post-it note about that and stick it on the pyrex dish. And then any indentations in the ashes--fingerprints, pebbleprints, whatever--showed up on film, especially when the sun was low and casting shadows, so I had to make sure the layer of ashes was perfectly smooth. Here's an example of what it looked like when the ashes weren't smooth:

Very moon-like, and kind of cool, except that the ash-shadows distracted from the pebbles.

I got very dirty doing this, and the dog's black coat was streaked in ashes. The mosquitos, especially while I was taking the dusk shots, were fierce.

I also took black and white shots on my film camera, but I'm saving those for another entry...

2011-12-03T18:43:00.000-08:00

GRAND CANYON

AfterImage Series

Post 12

After the milkweed episode (see Post 11), I realized I needed to consider a couple of things. I liked the look of the milkweed images, but they were random and rushed (I worked so fast I knocked myself in the teeth with my camera; I can't even begin to reconstruct how I did that). So...

1. I needed to think out how and where I'd shoot the pebbles--against what kinds of backgrounds? How would they look in terms of texture and color, and what meaning would they bring to the series?

2. I needed to decide how to arrange the pebbles. I'd come up with the World and Canyon Clock formats, and the AfterImage shape, but what else? Decorative patterns based on Native American geometries? I had to think about that...

3. I definitely needed to number the pebbles on the back and sketch out templates for each design. The clock patterns required particular pebbles, shot at specific times of day, but I had a box of 27 pebble petrographs that all looked pretty similar; I needed to make a shadow time chart, assign each shadow photo a number, and then mark the printed pebbles with corresponding numbers. Below are some of my notebook pages about the numbering system. The wrinkles and dirt on the second two page images come from them having been stuffed in every pocket I own, dropped in the sea, stepped on, you name it.

I also needed to create a system so I could arrange the stones quickly when I was on location with them, shifting from one pattern to another. After a few tries WITHOUT working from charts and numbers, I could see I was in real danger of losing my mind, squatting in dirt, bending over a line of pebbles with a crick in my back and two cameras swinging around my neck, trying to figure out which shadow pebble went where, while simultaneously attempting to switch between my new DSLR and old film camera (for the black and white images), without strangling myself. Not to mention fighting off both mosquitos and curious onlookers....

I thought it would be interesting, both visually and metaphorically, to work with background elements that represented different phases of the Grand Canyon's development: ash, for the volcanic rock; water, for ancient seas and the Colorado River, both of which have mightily shaped the Canyon; and both sand and mud, for the layers of sedimentary rock that make up the Canyon's walls. Later I decided to add colored beach pebbles themselves as a backdrop, as precursors to sand (mainly for visual interest) and also sea grass, representing the metamorphosed vegetable matter in Canyon rock.

Here's an early sketch I made of what I thought the World Clock series might look like, shot against different backgrounds: ashes, sand, marsh grass, and sea water.

A little crude, but you get the point.

There were also ideas that I discarded--or let's say shelved. I thought for awhile about placing the shadow pebbles on a musical scale as if they were notes--maybe a scale I'd drawn in the sand. And then let the tide come in and rearrange them...(I dreamt about copying the sheet music from "Thunder Road" in sand on the beach, with the pebbles as notes, and then photographing what happened to the music after waves moved the pebbles. How would the sea rewrite Bruce Springsteen, and how would that sound? I was first excited about this, then thought it was just plain nuts, then thought it really wasn't such a bad idea, and finally realized it was too hard for now...) Here's a sketch from my notebook depicting the shadow music...

Here's how the World Clock sketch turned out, photographed. The image on the left shows the pebbles in water; on the right, in twilight on seagrass, which actually looks more like the sketch...

2011-11-27T17:12:00.000-08:00

GRAND CANYON

AfterImage Series

Post 11

One day in late spring, about 20 minutes before I was due to arrive at a friend's, I was walking our dog Tenby on the bikepath in Northampton. Ruts along either edge of the path were filled with fuzzy milkweed seeds, blown there on the wind. If whiteness could precipitate out of fog and crystalize, like salt from seawater, it would look like milkweed: fuzzy, pale, opaque, and soft.

I raced back to the house with the dog, left her home, grabbed my camera and the pebbles I'd already printed, and ran back to the bikepath. I wanted to see what they'd look like against the milkweed. I had no time for canyon clocks or world sundials or any kind of grand thoughts. I just lined up the pebbles and shot. It was the first time I'd done any kind of "installation"--a grand word in this case--with the Canyon shadow beach pebbles. Luckily, only one guy stopped me and wanted to know what I was doing. I just said I had some really cool pebbles and wanted to see what they looked like in milkweed, and he wandered away...

Here's what I got:

And then I started playing with the images...

Still a lot of work to do...

2011-11-21T14:55:00.001-08:00

GRAND CANYON

After Image Series

Post 10

While I worked on printing my Canyon shadow photos on Atlantic beach pebbles, I wondered what the heck I was going to do with them. I'd thought about the space and time considerations that inspired them, but not what I would do with them aesthetically.

While I was at the Canyon I considered using them as a decorative border in a larger work. Here's a rough sketch...

But then I thought that the inclusion of larger, more representational images would dissipate their impact. I didn't want the shadow pebbles to be just decorative trim. So I scratched that idea.

Then I thought about using them as 3-dimensional brushstrokes that together would create a larger image, as these post-it sketches show. The first one depicts the split-twig figurine I mentioned in Post 7; the second, a Native American pot I bought--I included a photo of the actual pot because I think it's beautiful. (I made these sketches while on the phone with a tech rep in New Delhi, who was trying to help me install a new printer that came without a software CD. He and I spent so much time on the phone together that when we finally hung up all his co-workers got on the line to say good-bye as well, and I knew his grandmother's recipe for dal.)

I had a happy week during which I thought these post-its cracked the issue, but then I decided they were hokey. Also, I'd have to make a ton of printed pebbles...

And then I began thinking about boomerangs and clocks.

I remembered the false After Image I'd had plastered on my retina back at the Canyon--whether from altitude sickness, exhaustion, or eye strain--and realized I could conjure its boomerang shape and suggestive, Native American-like geometric designs with the printed pebbles. These images could be emblematic of my whole Canyon experience.

Here's a sketch I made of what an After Image design might look like a dusk, taken against a backdrop of marsh grass (I was anticipating an upcoming vacation in Maine, where I intended to photo the petrograph pebbles along the coast), and a photo from the actual installation.

I'd written down the time of day I'd taken every shadow picture. So I began to think I could also arrange the pebbles in a row to create clocks: essentially sundials in straight lines. I imagined one as a Canyon Clock of particular shadows I'd come to know well and considered emblematic of different times of day: morning, noon, and night. In these images time, symbolized by shadows, would tick forward but location--the Grand Canyon--would remain the constant. (Sorry, no sketches for that...)

Another might be a World Clock, of shadows taken at the Canyon at different times of day, which I could use to stand in for different locations around the world: in this sundial time would remain still but locations would imaginatively roam the globe. To create this series I found shadows I'd shot at 9:30 am, 1:30 pm, 3:30 pm, and 4:30 pm, representing, sequentially, the same moment at the Grand Canyon; La Paz, Bolivia; Tasiilaq, Greenland, and Cardiff, Wales. I thought I might write a one-page story to correspond to each pebble in the clock...

Here's how it turned out...

2011-11-15T13:55:00.000-08:00

GRAND CANYON

AfterImage Series

Post 9

I left the Grand Canyon on 15 February 2011. I was sad to leave, but it was time to go home to Massachusetts and shovel snow.

Visually and metaphorically, the Canyon's shadows came with me, in my mind and my mind's eye. I loved the way they slashed through the rock and made it disappear, except at noon, when they vanished themselves. They seemed to have powers of instant erosion, replacing what was hard and solid and sure with what was suggested and mysterious and unknown. The shadows became emblems to me of the imagination, and the creative process itself.

Gail, a friend I met on a hike in Wales, told me about Carl Jung's thoughts on shadows. Jung, she said (while hiking through an abandoned slate mine) believed that everyone carries a shadow, a part of the self that is rarely expressed; the more the shadow edges into a person's conscious life, the better. The darker the shadow, the deeper the repression. And that, as we've learned, is the stuff of all kinds of problems...

I've been thinking about this. What would be hidden in the Canyon's shadow? What does the earth have pressed into its subconscious? I could do worse with my time than keep thinking about this.

But these are more recent thoughts. When I returned home from the Canyon in February what hit me was the scale of my everyday, East Coast life. Shadows here are attached to trees and people; they're not repositories of wonder. The horizon is near, and I'm within an hour of three state lines. We live not on, but in, a small scale, not a large one.

This reminded me of the idea I'd had of using beach pebbles as the surface on which to print my shadow photos. Transmute the great to small. Bring the Canyon and its immensities into the zone of my own tiny life. And bring it back to its roots in the sea; because without primeval seas, there would be no Canyon rock.

And when you think about it, coming back to the shadows themselves, we tend to think of shadows as being linked to the past--the days and memories and ghosts that stretch behind us in darkness. And yet, it occurred to me, shadows are actually projections of the self into the future. Light first strikes whatever object casts a shadow, before it strikes what the shadow is cast upon, below or next to it.

So our minds place shadows in the past, but our bodies cast them into the future. Once and future touchstones of what was, is, and can be. I can't imagine a better emblem for the erosive magnificence of the Grand Canyon.

So in March I gathered up a host of beach pebbles that Marguerite and I had collected along the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, Canada, in 2008. Here are some of them before they were printed:

And here's where they come from:

I printed them throughout the spring.

2011-10-27T12:50:00.000-07:00

GRAND CANYON

AfterImage Series

Post 8

Canyon Faces

At the Watchtower

Judging Kids' Art

With the Mules

With the Mule Wranglers

The Great CheeseHeads with Whom I Watched the SuperBowl

At Hopi House

Hiking the Kaibab Trail

Rangers' Meeting, Very Early, in the Cold

Mary on the Rim

At the Archives

And Still I Kept Thinking About the Shadows...

2011-10-25T08:18:00.000-07:00

GRAND CANYON

AfterImage Series

Post 7

Petrographs, Petroglyphs, and Rock Art

One biting-bitter afternoon I walked over to the Grand Canyon archives. It was about 18 F and the inside of my nose froze. It was worth it, though. Mike Quinn, the Canyon's official photographer, has photographed nearly all of the rock paintings and petroglyphs--rock carvings or engravings--in the Park and the surrounding area. Mike said he wanted to live in a place that tilted toward nature rather than people. And that he hoped his images would help get word out to others that it's still possible to come to a place like the Grand Canyon and have an epiphany moment. To find that supra-human perspective on time and space.

We talked about our kind's age-old desire to fuse the human and the lithic. My wedding of the "snapshot moment" captured in photographic memory to the "near eternity" of stone, and Native Americans' use of the Canyon walls as a palette that they worked with brushes and knives. Anytime any of us uses stone for artistic expression, it's an acknowledgement of our mortality. Our marks will be here after us; stone makes communication possible across time and acknowledges heartbreak, simultaneously. Stone borrows its emotion from us.

I had a look at the archive and made some sketches. I love the fat man in a panic.

While I was there Kim, one of the archivists, showed me some things that were supposed to be ephemeral but thanks to the Canyon's dry heat, turned out to have some eternity to them. These split-twig figurines are between 3-5000 years old. They were new when Stonehenge was going up.

After my archives trip I visited the Desert Watch Tower, a structure based on Hopi architecture of the Southwest, built by architect Mary Colter in 1933. Colter asked artist Fred Greer to copy some of the regions petroglyphs and rock paintings inside the tower walls. The image that starts off this entry is one of Greer's beautiful copies. Climbing the tower was like being inside an animist otherworld wedged inside a conch shell.

Despite all that painted whimsy, what I remembered at night was this image of a petroglyph, photographed by Mike Quinn:

It looks to me like an image carved on the moon. I lay in bed thinking of it several nights in a row--mainly because I couldn't sleep. Altitude sickness showed up in me as insomnia. Here's my journal entry on "Sleeplessness." I've chosen the image above as my personal pictograph--my own ideogram--of Me in My Canyon Nights.

Thursday 3 February 2011

Day and night have more ying and yang at the Canyon than they do in Massachusetts.

By day there is not only light but near-biblical Illumination. Bright, unclouded light streams into the apartment, revealing tiny cracks that the dry air pries open in my skin, around my eyes. It pries the Canyon open, too, and fills it with color and form and distance and ravens.

But at night the Canyon becomes a hole—a black hole that wouldn’t even exist without memory’s help. Around 6:30 each evening, after 5 beeps—the alarm setting itself—the last of the shop keepers leaves, and after that there’s no sound but the clock and the wind. Sometimes I play music, but even Bruce-up-loud fills only a corner of the dark black silence. He sounds like a kid whistling to himself on a lonely road.

So this is what electricity is for. I put small lights on in the bedroom and kitchen, marking my trail. The living room is well lit until I go to bed. Bedtime is more sport than activity. It’s like training for an endurance event—long-distance running, maybe—that you approach with fondness, dread, weariness, and a little excitement. You have your rituals, you stretch and prep, and once you get started you hope you’ll find your stride.

I enjoy sitting in bed reading. Books always compete with their surroundings, but in the absence of almost everything they win hands down. Reading at the Canyon is a vivid, holistic experience. I’m drawn wholly into the text. But at the same time I’m not entirely at ease. When I stop reading and look over the top of the spine, I see a double of the bed, the red cloth that hangs behind it to block the window, and a woman in bed reading. It’s the reflection in the studio window, two rooms away on the far side of the apartment, and without my glasses it’s only the suggestion of a reflection.

I’m drawn to it but in a wary way. I wait for it to do something I’m not doing. Or for something to appear that has no match in my room. That I can’t really see it makes this monitoring challenging. It’s pointless, yet irrationally essential.

Reading and looking are preludes to sleep, and sleep is the sport itself. I don’t sleep well here and I don’t know why. After the lights go out I seem to leave the human realm and enter an older, more primitive state. Like an animal whose wellbeing depends on non-stop sensory input, I can’t entirely shut my antennae off. I crave knowledge of what’s going on in the absence of activity and light and company.

There are two sounds: the wind howling—how loud depends on how far I’ve opened the canyon-side window—and the gurgling of the humidifier. The only humidifier on earth that jets out icy-cold steam.

I do sleep. I want to sleep, that’s why I’m in bed. To do so, however, I’ve had to gnaw off the corners of sleeping pills and hope for the best. I fill my mind with imaged static. One night I catalogued my clothes. Another I shopped at Hopi House. The best strategy is talking to the pup, stroking her head as she licks my nose and saying like a mantra, “P knows. P nose. P loves Tenby. P knows.” That often works. I wonder if she feels my touch 3000 miles away, at home.

I wake often, and each time try to claw my way back to my human self so I can retract my antenna. How rested I am in the morning depends on how well I succeed. (Note: I’ve since discovered that sleeplessness is a common response to high altitude. At 7000 ft., the altitude is high and sleep is not forthcoming…)

2011-10-17T19:07:00.000-07:00

GRAND CANYON

AfterImage Series

Post 6

One day I went hiking on the South Rim Trail and

stepped into a miracle.

My footprint

Not my footprints (fossil footprints of an ancient creature whose name I did

not record; let's call him Leon).

The miracle had nothing to do with my footprints or

Leon's. Here's how I described it in my journal:

Grand Canyon Journal

Sunday 30 January 2011

"Wind "

You walk and breathe and walk and breathe. You breathe without thinking.

You're doing all your thinking and feeling with your eyes. The Canyon's

beside you and what you're thinking is how to mark this place on your soul

and make it matter. Make it rearrange your bone structure and your

metabolism. Make you get up in the morning for sunrise, which is some-

thing you've almost never done.

You're thinking these things and you're aware, on and off, that it's hurt-you

bright and that the innermost of the four layers you're wearing, the sweaty

one you thought you'd have to shed, is now essential in all this wind. You're

thinking that your hands are swollen from swinging as you walk, and too

cold at the same time.

You walk and breathe and walk and breathe. On a curve in the South Rim

Trail, tearing over low scrub oak silhouetted against the bright distance,

comes a gust screaming in. You don't know it's coming. It hasn't reached you

yet. Milliseconds before it arrives you stop walking and yawn, unexpectedly.

Walking is tiring and you're on mile four, maybe five, and the wind has

wearied you. As you open your mouth and inhale--a big intake of sharp

January air--the wind hits you with a high-pitched, hollow, beautiful, fluted

howl.

And there's your miracle. You're startled out of your skin. For that portion

of that second, until your relentlessly logical, you-damn-well-wished-it-

wouldn't brain shatters the harmony, you and this place are the same thing.

You're startled because your lungs suddenly had superpowers and sucked

the air straight from the Canyon, and it came rushing to them with a

surprised yelp and it filled you to your soul's brim.

This really happens to you. It's a memory, it's not a fiction, not a metaphor.

For one split second of flawless harmony, the wind was inside you, not out.

You were this place.

These were some of the things I saw on my walk.

And I met these people, too, about 10 minutes before I yawned. They were all from Hawaii, and they were freezing.

The hike had got me thinking about scale: my lungs

sucking the air out of the Canyon. The shock of contrast

was what stayed with me. I wanted to print my shadow

shots in a way that was true to this place, that captured

the shock of scale and the immensity of erosion. And

the beauty of shadows. And I thought to myself, Hey,

self, why not print the shadow images on beach

pebbles? So much of the Canyon rock is lime and sand-

stone, products of ancient oceans...I decided when I got

home I would collect tiny white beach pebbles from the

Atlantic seaboard and print them with images of

thousand-feet-long black shadow streaks from the

Canyon. The results, together, might look lie abstract

Native American geometrics...

An idea that I haven't pursued: the shadows printed as musical

notes on a scale

This is more like it. A series of shadow-printed pebbles...

2011-10-10T13:58:00.000-07:00

GRAND CANYON

AfterImage Series

Entry 5

Mary Diaz was one of my favorite people on the planet. I knew almost nothing when I arrived as a freshman at Brown, but Mary was on my hall and I knew I wanted to be her friend. If she was excited about something she'd grab your arm and shake it up and down. Sometimes she thought chocolate and Grape Nuts were more important than going to class. Being on time ranked lower than advocating for the world's refugee women and children. Tennis was good but ice cream was better. She had a strong faith, but she asked hard questions.

Mary and I were chambermaids together for a summer on Block Island. Once we ate an entire half-gallon of ice cream and a jar of fudge sauce for lunch. Every night we dug a hole in the sand, lined it with rocks, and cooked our dinner. We broke into a summer cottage just to go to the bathroom and cried over Tess of the D'Urbervilles. After you do that, you're pretty much sisters, even though your DNA says otherwise.

Mary died of pancreatic cancer in 2004. There's a great tennis tournament every summer in Columbus, Ohio in her memory, and that of William Copeland, which raises funds for PanCan research (http://www.diaztennis.bbnow.org/). My artwork doesn't raise money but it helps me keep Mary's memory fresh and pertinent and beside me, whenever I travel. (This, for the woman who once got a passport on the way to the plane....) A few years ago I printed some rocks with Mary's image and decided to take one with me wherever I go, so that as art, she will continue to do and become and evolve along with me.

The image that opens this post is the newest in the Mary Series, from my favorite particular place on earth, Pentre Ifan cromlech, near Newport in Northern Pembrokeshire, Wales. The ones that follow were taken at the Canyon. These images aren't part of my AfterImage Series, but they exist beside, and enrich, it.

I took some of these pictures lying on my belly on an escarpment that jutted precariously out into the Canyon. I carefully inched out there, and carefully inched back. This is what I wrote in my journal when I came inside:

Monday, 7 February 2011, “Mary & Pam”

They had sand in common that summer. Sand on the floors they swept, sand in the sheets they changed. Sand in the shack where they stayed. Sand at the bottom of the toilets they cleaned that flushed away but always returned with the backwash. Sand in their sneakers, sand on the chocolate donuts they dropped on the beach and ate anyway. Sand under their fingernails after they dug fire holes at the beach to cook their dinner.

Twenty years later one is sand in the other’s memory. Not quite a pearl. Not yet. But the grit is there and memory is working on it.

Pam is lying on her belly on a precipice at the Grand Canyon. Not too close to the edge because her father warned her, and deep down, when it comes to things like this, she heeds her father’s advice. (She will never bicycle, ever, without wearing shoes). In front of her is a pebble imprinted with Mary’s photo. It’s lodged in a canning jar in a bed of sand and smaller pebbles. The jar is filled with water—a marker of the long-ago summer and the far-off Atlantic.

Pam photographs the memory held in stone as early morning sun wakes the jar. Stone is all around her. Trillions of individuals sleep in this motherlode of stone. And yet only this one in the canning jar has a face.

She scrambles carefully to her feet—she’s heard about mules going over the edge, and the condors who come to feast—and discovers she’s covered with dust. The remains of creatures that once sought food and safety and were genetically programmed to reproduce now cling to her black ski jacket. She’s brushing it off when she looks up. A mule deer is staring right at her. Very close. There’s another nearby, in the shadows behind her, picking her way carefully around the rocks.

Click on "The Mary Series" on the lefthand side of my blog to see more images from other locations. One of the mason jar images will be included in the National Park Service Exhibition, "Through Your Eyes," in 2012.

2011-10-03T10:40:00.000-07:00

GRAND CANYON

AfterImage Series

Entry 4

One day I stayed in the apartment and took photos every half hour, from the same vantage point, of the shadows moving across the Canyon. I began at 7:45 am and finished at 6 pm. Here's the sequential sundial...

2011-09-22T12:20:00.000-07:00

GRAND CANYON:

AfterImage Series

Entry 3

I had some responsibilities at the Canyon. It wasn't a scott-free deal, but it was a pretty sweet one. The AIR program gave me an astonishing place to live for 3 weeks. I was about as far from the sheer drop of the South Rim as a pitcher is from home plate. And I was on the second floor, with access to a rooftop deck (really just the flat rooftop of Verkamp's Visitors Center porch), so I could overlook the earth's innards. I loved it when tourists would pose in front of the Canyon, which meant they'd be facing Verkamp's, and muse to the wind, "How'd that woman get up there?"

In return for all this I provided the AIR program with 3 public services. I gave the 8th graders at the Grand Canyon School a creative writing lesson; I gave a talk on how petrographs came to be; and most memorably, I judged a children's art contest.

The class went pretty well. Halfway through I realized I'd forgotten to wear a bra in front of a group of 8th graders, and lost my concentration. To make up for it I became even more energetic than usual, until a girl sitting cross-legged at my feet asked me to stop waving my arms around. "Whenever you do that," she said, "the ashes fly up in the fireplace behind you and rain down on our heads."

Sure enough, the kids were covered in ash.

I gave the class the sentence, "I was making pancakes when the monster came, and..." The assignment was to complete it.

One kid said, "...cut eye, mouth, and nose holes out of the pancakes and wore them as a mask." But this was my favorite: "...said, "Hi honey, what's for breakfast?"

Judging the art show sounded like fun, but proved to be a real conscience-tickler. How do you choose between a kindergardener's masterwork and a high school student's pretty good assignment? Technique or inspiration? A young woman named Celina--my co-judge--and I nearly pulled out our hair.

Here's what I wrote about it for The Daily Telegraph...

Artist in residence: creating art in America's natural masterpiece

In the first report from her three-week asignment, Pamela Petro, artist in residence at the Grand Canyon, is tasked with judging the creative efforts of America's imaginative youth.

Examples of the work created by Pamela Petro's young novices

By Pamela Petro

2:21PM GMT 04 Feb 2011

I woke this morning to coral-colored sunlight streaming across my bed and furious snow flurries framed in my window.

Canyon weather is like a kid’s drawing or a Cubist painting, an otherworld where no space/time combinations are impossible. Very cool, but it makes dressing difficult. The weather, as it happens, was a perfect template forthe day’s activities. One of my responsibilities as Artist in Residence is to do a series of community programmes, and today was my first.

I and a young woman named Celina, who’s about to embark on a career as an art teacher, formed a panel of two as jurors of this year’s Grand Canyon’s Kolb Studio Annual Student Art Show. It was our job to select first, second, and third place winners in four groups: 5-7 year-olds, 8-10 year-olds, 11- 13 year-olds, and 14-18 year-olds.

The theme this year was “Creating Traditions,” which, we discovered, can mean just about anything. To get the kids’ paints, pencils, markers, and crayons moving, organizers set a series of questions.What unique traditions do you or your family follow? What traditions do you have in common with others in your community? How do you create new traditions?

Based on the work we saw today, the American Southwest is in for some freaky new customs.

“Deers Kissing” is one. (Not “deer,” but “deers,” as the title insisted.) Another is sword-carrying snakes, pictured in a work called “Camping in the Woods.” There were also more, well, traditional traditions: kids drawing the Canyon, kids depicting the Canyon in collages, kids drawing animals, brothers, sisters, still-lives, friends, Native American iconography, and that perennial favourite, bugs.

At one point Celina remarked that many of the pieces must’ve been made at Christmas, since the kids filled their skies with massive, bright-rayed stars that looked like shorthand for the star. “Oh, no,” said Helen, one of the organizers. “That’s the way stars look to these children.”

That exchange, more than all the rock strata scribbled in yellow, red, and orange markers, reminded me I was judging a contest at the Grand Canyon and nowhere else. That’s how the stars look to me at night, too, from the crown of the sky all the way to the horizon. These children take nothing for granted.

Some of the titles were extraordinary. “Weather or Not” showed a storm over the Canyon—black clouds that looked like they needed a shave, heavily crayoned on neon-orange paper. “Night of the Silent River” and the cerebral “As You Go Within” were more about words than images. As was my very favourite title, “The Grand Canyon with 19, The Red Headed Condor.” We never figured out what that meant, but we liked it a lot.

Should someone ever ask you to judge a children’s art contest, don’t think, “Oh, how sweet! That’ll be fun.” You might as well reply, “Oh, forget the contest. I’ll just go straight out and crush children’s hopes and dreams underfoot, rather than critique their work. It’ll go faster that way.”

Celina and I agonized for three hours and looked at over 200 drawings, paintings, collages, and three-dimensional pieces. If Rene Westbrook, the Artist in Residency Coordinator for the South Rim, hadn’t brought us homemade Pad Thai for lunch, we’d still be there, too weak to make our selections.

We finally settled on “Painting of the Grand Canyon” by seven year-old Maria Hernandez as Best in Show, a vibrant, liquidy watercolor that looked to me like Chagall on a good day, with a new paint box. I hope this will create a new tradition for Maria: drawing what she so clearly loves.

Pamela Petro will be writing two further columns for Telegraph Travel, recounting her experiences as the Grand Canyon's artist-in-residence.

Here's Celina holding up Maria's winning work:

I heard later that some folks weren't too happy that a second grader had won, but Maria was happy.

Thanks to all the students at the Grand Canyon School whose work is featured in this post! And to all the students who submitted to the show. It was a delightful agony choosing amongst your work!

2011-09-19T05:27:00.000-07:00

GRAND CANYON:

AfterImage Series

ENTRY 2

I had a lot of work to do at the Canyon.

Before I went I had an image of myself sitting cross-legged on the South Rim, communing with Time and Stone and other Big Ideas. I also saw myself pursuing Serious Art by day and musing and drinking wine by night, watching the Australian Open on my computer as the sun set, the stars crowded the sky, and the mule deer began to nose around. As it turned out, my MFA in Creative Writing students at Lesley University had major assignments due, so I spent a lot of time grading. And thanks to the kindness and interest of my editor, Michael Kerr, at The Daily Telegraph in London, I wound up with two major stories to write about my time at the Canyon, with three blog entries in between. As for the wine drinking...I didn't react well to the altitude--about 6000 feet, I believe, as opposed to my sea-level life in Massachusetts--and felt ever so slightly motion sick much of the time. Just enough to put me off of red wine (though I gamely persevered as best I could).

It was wonderful to have work and I'm deeply grateful for it, especially after struggling for the previous few years. But it meant I worked from non-stop, from breakfast to bed at night. Some of the work was walking, and taking photos, and thinking, and sketching, but unlike the freeflow of experience I'd imagined, I wound up scheduling creativity between bouts of paying work. Not quite the communing I'd imagined, but heck, I was still living on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Who can complain?

One of the Telegraph stories was due just a few days after I arrived. Because I had nothing to write about yet, I spent an intense day "experiencing" the place--mingling and meeting Japanese, Dutch, British, German, and Australian tourists, hiking, petting visiting dogs, just generally poking around. Trying to keep in mind what my dad said about not getting too close to the edge. (Everything will be alright, according to my dad, if you don't get too close to the edge and always wear shoes when you ride a bike.)

Then after dark I set into writing the story. I hadn't finished by morning, so I got up around 5 am in order for the ms. to arrive in London by noon UK-time (meaning I needed to send it by 7:00). As I made tea and breakfast I kept rubbing my eyes. I thought they were just early-morning blurry, sticky and not-yet-ready-for-vision. But as I watched the teapot steam I realized there was an image obscuring my sight. I took it to be the after image of something I'd looked at--something high-contrast that burned onto my retina, like a light-bulb in the dark apartment (the sun wasn't up yet). Yet I hadn't looked at anything like that.

The floating thing was stubborn and wouldn't go away. Instead it hovered between the center and left periphery of my vision, obscuring my toast, my tea cup, the computer screen and keyboard. If I tried to look at it it would scoot to the left and pulsate, like an angry sea creature. I was fantastically frustrated and impatient with it as the clock ticked, and London waited, rubbing and rubbing, hoping that when I next opened my eyes, it would be gone.

But no. It stayed, and I worked through it. After I sent my story off I sat in the now-light-filled apartment and tried to see inside my brain. How can you focus on your own retina? I'm not sure if I was thinking the image or seeing it, but gradually I got a good impression, and sketched what I came to see as a beautiful obstruction. It was shaped like a boomerang and filled with interlocked geometric forms, very like the designs I'd seen the previous day on Native American pots.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the apartment looked like this strange image. It was the after image of my own imagination, brought on by altitude, tension, and eye-strain, I guess. I decided to embrace it and make it my motif. As an installation artist I was unable to complete my project at the Canyon: national park land is off-limits as a natural resource for all purposes but inspiration. So my final work would be a kind of after image--or series of after images--as well. It seemed fitting.

Later in the day I took a nap. And that night I had more than one glass of wine...

Here are some random notes from my journal on the day of my first "experiencing," in order to write for The Telegraph:

"At the mule pen: big fight! Much nipping and kicking. Smells!"

"Canyon names features gods and heroes of the world. Why? 'Heroic nomenclature' includes Isis Temple, Kaibab Plateau Cheops Pyramid, Buddah Temple, and Zoraster Temple. Learning meets rock."

"Overheard: "It's just surreally beautiful. My vocabulary hurts."

"From a mule wrangler: The difference between riding a mule and riding a horse is like the difference between riding in a Cadillac and riding in a washing machine. Mules are just a whole lot smoother."

"Quiet. Bright. Smells of pinon pine. Sky crystalline blue. Like taking a shower in photons."

And here are the links to my Telegraph stories on the Canyon:

The First http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/northamerica/usa/8299255/USA-The-art-of-the-Grand-Canyon.html

The Last http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/northamerica/usa/8357381/The-Grand-Canyon-an-insiders-guide.html

My favorite in-between blog about the Canyon's mule wranglers http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/artsandculture/8316787/Artist-in-residence-the-mules-of-the-Grand-Canyon.html

2011-09-11T08:04:00.000-07:00

GRAND CANYON: AfterImage Series

This is the first of 25 or more weekly posts that will chronicle one of the most extraordinary opportunities of my life: spending 3 weeks living on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon as Artist in Residence, in January and February, 2011.

The blog series will unfold in something like real time--or rather the recreation of real time. It's a stab at capturing the inspiration process, rather than simply presenting inspiration's finished product. I'll begin with my arrival at the Canyon, and the ideas that flowed so fast I could barely make a cup of tea, because I had to keep rushing back to my notebook in the living room, which looked out onto the North Rim, to jot down ideas I'd had while waiting for the water to boil in the kitchen...I had no peace, and that was good.

The Artist in Resident's living room, above Verkamp's Visitor's Center. To the right is the view from the living room window.

As the series unfolds I'll chronicle these invasive, tea-interrupting ideas, and how they evolved from scribbles and sketches into finished artwork--or, I should say, are still evolving, as the work as a whole is still in progress. (Let's hope I finish by February, 2012, as I'd like to conclude the series more or less a year to the day I left the Canyon. It'll be a push, so if my friends wonder why I'm slow in returning emails, please know that I'm not lying on the sofa peeling grapes, but trying to turn these fragments into art...)

Most entries will be posted on Monday mornings--unless I'm traveling, and then it's anyone's guess.

For anyone interested in the South Rim AIR program, see their website: http://www.nps.gov/grca/supportyourpark/air.htm

ENTRY 1

I arrived at the apartment. And there was the Canyon in the windows. I wasn't ready to see it yet--I didn't feel up to it. I was tired and jet-lagged, already beginning to struggle with what I'd learn would be altitude sickness. I needed to be sharp--ultra-sharp, perception honed, mind's eye memory at the ready--to meet the moment head on, my first view of the Grand Canyon. Ready to make a fine memory. And instead my hair was dirty and I was tired and I had a pebble in my boot. So I turned around and didn't look right away.

That lasted about 30 guilty seconds. When I did look out the lavish windows, into the vast red expanse, I still wasn't on my game, but can anyone ever live up to the Grand Canyon? The first thing I noticed were the absences.

Journal entry: 26 January 2011

My first view of the Grand Canyon

I saw what wasn’t there before I saw what was. The blank spaces, the deep blue shadows falling from the face of the North Rim—they leapt at me and claimed my sight.

The majesty of distance; the rocky reds and golds; the ancient tendrils of earth shakily staking a spot in the sun for deep time: these things brought me to the edge of tears when I thought about them.

But those negative spaces came before thought. The rivers of shadow flowing down the North Rim. Time manifested vertically, pivoting horizontally. The Canyon as sundial, its cast shadows marking a trail of time like the one labeled on the South Rim Trail, albeit in hours instead of eons.

Alright: I guess I thought about the absences, too. But that came later. First came the lure of abstraction: the blank, blue, negative spaces, streaming like inky tributaries of the night sky—at 5 pm, in strong late sun, a once and future promise—down to the Colorado River. Repositories of the imagination. Where fiction grows and flourishes.

2011-07-02T08:29:00.000-07:00

To obtain your copy of the inaugural issue of The Ocean State Review, email copies@etal.uri.edu. The journal is $12.00 per copy.

My graphic essay, "Ghosts of Overbrook: A Fable," illustrated with petrograph images from the Ghosts of Overbrook series, was published last week in the inaugural issue of The Ocean State Review. Here's a sample page:

Check out the new journal--it's filled with surprising, wonderful writing.

2011-06-25T19:17:00.001-07:00

Four Craigs and Four Maries at Hughlet Point,

Northern Neck, Virginia

Two years ago I found a piece of driftwood along the beachfront at Hughlet Point on the Chesapeake Bay, in Virginia. The coast has invaded the forest here; stumps of trees, smoothed and weathered gull-grey, stand knee-deep in the sea, as if forming a strange, permeable, erratic fence. Some trees lie flat, but most stand; the driftwood was a knotted arm broken off one of them.

I brought it home and printed it with a photograph of my brother Craig and his wife Marie, who live just a few miles up the shoreline, at the mouth of the Wicomico River. They're new to the area: casting their image into the sea on local bark was an act of introduction.

I took these pictures as the driftwood bobbed and flipped and spun and stuck in the warm wavelets along the shore. It wouldn't hold still, and my back ached from chasing it in a hermit-crab position. But I got some good images at different depths, under and out of the water. The sky and colors kept changing, with the result that some images read blue, others green, others ochre-brown, so I followed the color-thought of the moment and encouraged the hues to continue down the paths they'd already begun in the sun--or lack thereof...

2011-05-18T06:57:00.000-07:00

Pam and Mary at Conques Abbey in the Aveyron, France

2011-03-26T18:47:00.000-07:00

Recent Framing Projects

This was a 56" x 44" montage from my Faces in Nature Installation, that was originally shown at "Faces" in downtown Northampton. Shortly before I went out to the Grand Canyon as the January Artist in Residence there, the South Rim AIR program generously offered me a solo exhibition to coincide with my residency. So I shipped this hot-from-the-framer's montage via UPS, along with some other work. The montage arrived in 2 pieces; the edges looked as if they'd been chewed by dinosaurs. I managed to salvage nine contiguous images (from the upper lefthand corner), and it's currently being reframed.

This little triptych from the "Tides" installation on the Bay of Fundy was a much-delayed birthday present for my friend Caroline, a sculptor who lives in Shropshire, England. These incandescent, mushroom-like garden forms were her gift to me:

This montage is called "Marys of the Northeast," from the Mary Memorial series. From the top, left to right, the petrographs were shot in different rivers in Chester, Vermont (August 2009); Northampton, Mass (July 2009); Williamsburg, Mass (November 2009); Doorloo, New York (May 2010); Williamsburg, Mass (November 2009); and Northampton, Mass (July 2009).

2011-02-12T06:33:00.000-08:00

Thinking of Mary at the Grand Canyon...

2010-10-14T18:47:00.000-07:00

New Work, Old Series

From the Mary Series: taken in Dorloo, New York, May 2010

2010-08-29T11:02:00.000-07:00

The Menna Series

I printed this series on a deep-sea scallop shell that began life somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean between The Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec, Canada--where I found it--and West Wales, where my friend, the Welsh poet Menna Elfyn, lives and writes. I took the photo of Menna on a hike we made together in 2005, up to the summit of Carningli--the Hill of Angels--in the Preseli Hills of Northern Pembrokeshire. It was a grey day of wind and rain, and clouds sweeping in off the sea.

The installation--in a sunny inlet swamped by sea grass fronds--which I created in Massachusetts in summer, 2010, brings the pan-Atlantic process full circle. Like Menna's poetry, which is often fueled by her perpetual travels across the ocean, these images of her harvest the depths and reveal them on the incoming tide. Here is a bit from her poem "Rhyddfraint Pentywyn," or in English, "Pendine Sands"

Here you can learn

that we don't so much learn how to live

as not to give

one inch to death

lest the high tide overtake us.

2010-03-25T15:32:00.000-07:00

The Overbrook Series

Overbrook is the name of a former mental hospital in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, set on over 90 acres of hillside parkland. It opened in 1896 and closed a hundred years later, during the 1990s. Essex County originally planned to sell the land for housing development--just what Essex County needed: more houses--but has now set it aside as open space for a county park.

I grew up in the shadow of Overbrook. When I was a kid there were two horns that sounded in Verona--my town, neighboring Cedar Grove--that could be heard townwide. One was the firehouse siren, the other was the Overbrook siren, hoarser and higher-pitched, which would be sounded when someone "escaped" from the hospital. One of my earliest memories is of a neighbor, a heavy white man, racing down our street chasing a young black man, shouting to me--the only witness, a little girl of 5 or 6--to call the police. "He's an escapee," the neighbor shouted, over and over. What I remember is their gait: the loping, easy run of the chased, and the cramped, bicycle-like pumping of the chaser. One was Elmer Fudd. The other, Bugs Bunny.

The Overbrook buildings have been decaying and crumbling earthwards for a decade. One winter evening, late in 2008, I found a pile of slate roof tiles next to a dumpster, pried from a recently razed house. I took several armfuls, on which I've printed images of Overbrook's dead, dying, and neglected trees. Overbrook is its trees. Weeping beeches, copper beeches, oaks, evergreens: immense and old, grotesquely gnarled sometimes, leafing out each spring almost against their wills.

The buildings and trees are contemporaries, and both will be gone soon. Parks employ nature by creating it fresh. The county park will start over again with a clean slate. In the meantime, these images depict partners in memorial that have stood together for 100 years.

2009-11-02T10:38:00.000-08:00

Collaborative Portraits

Portraiture is inherently collaborative: a visual rendezvous between what an artist sees and intuits what a subject presents and allows.

I'm embarking on a new Series of petrographs that will be determined as much by a subject's choices and preferences as by mine.

Here is the equation: A viewer interested in becoming the subject of a portrait may get in touch with me via email (pamelapetro@comcast.net). I'll send the subject a series of short questions about his or her likes and dislikes, designed to help me select an environment and the items that I'll print. For instance: ocean, forest, river, city; leaves, feathers, shells, etc. The subject will then select several photos of him or herself, which I'll use to create an outdoor installation. The result--the collaboration--will be unique to the subject but filtered through my decision-making and the happenstance of nature.

Prices are negotiable, varying from a single portrait to a triptych. These images are from past collaborations.

2009-10-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

Previews of New Work

It looks like a double-exposure, but it's not. I pointed the camera into a rubble-filled hallway at Overbrook, an abandoned mental hospital in New Jersey, and it caught sun streaming through east-facing windows onto the floor, as well as the reflection of spring foliage in the window pane. More images from the Overbrook Series--to be printed on century-old slate roofing tiles from demolished hospital buildings--will come in Fall 2009.

The shadow of a dog: a photo of my dog Tenby, taken by my friend Annette Kling, printed on glass, cast on a lawn in strong summer sun. A shadow of a shadow of a dog...

Mary Series

I shot these pictures of my friend Mary when we were both in college (Brown University, '82). The petrographs are new, and I took these images in a Massachusetts river in Summer, 2009. Mary died of pancreatic cancer five years ago; this is the very beginning of my memorial to her...

2008-10-19T07:10:00.000-07:00

Faces in Nature

An exhibition in the display window at "Faces" (185 Main St.) in downtown Northampton, Massachusetts, to be held from 11-31 May 2009.

2008-09-21T07:34:00.000-07:00

TIDES

Recent petrographic images of Marguerite from a tidal inlet in New Brunswick, Canada, on the Bay of Fundy. Because Fundy has the highest--and lowest--tides in the world, a lot of debris rushes in and out of the inlets. In these pictures, seaweed and mud (loosened by my having dropped the stones into the water) were racing over the petrographs on a fast-flowing, out-going tide. The water speed and relatively low depth made for a wealth of pattern in the currents, which caught the late afternoon sun.

Note: Check out Suzanne Carlson's site at suzannecarlson.wordpress.com. Suzanne was a crucial participant in the Fleeting Fossils installation in downtown Northampton in Fall, 2007.

2008-08-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

Ocean

River

Winter

2008-04-13T11:36:00.000-07:00

Fleeting Fossils Bluestone Pathway

Pathway to the Past was completed in April, 2008, in downtown Northampton, Massachusetts. It was composed of 43 petrographs on Pennsylvania bluestone lain on the lawn of the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence. The above image shows the pathway shortly after I installed it. Most of the paving stones were printed with images of the city and surrounding area lent by Historic Northampton (the originals, most of which are in the Howes Brothers Collection, were shot between 1850-1950). The images below are details of two individual petrographs, the first an historic image, the second shot by a resident of the Lathrop Retirement Community in Northampton. (See below for more information on the Fleeting Fossils installation involving Lathrop and Jackson Street Elementary School.)

For the latest featured link, see http://www.sprintsystems.com/artists.htm

2007-10-11T03:40:00.000-07:00

Petrographs and Fleeting Fossils

Marcus' Image, above, is from the Fleeting Fossils Installation in Northampton, Massachusetts. The photograph was printed on a city sidewalk; the first image is a digital shot taken immediately after the petrograph was printed. The second image was shot on film the morning after we printed; its cracks reveal where the photo emulsion froze overnight. To see more sidewalk prints, please scroll down to the end of the Fleeting Fossils posting.

Petrographs

Marguerite, Sandwich Beach Installation I, 2006

“Petrographs” are photographic images printed on stone.

Photography has been called the process of “drawing a man’s shadow to stone.” Petrographs make the metaphor literal. By casting and briefly fixing our shadows on the bedrock, they juxtapose the short span of our mortal memories with the expanse of geological time.

The photograph above was taken on a stormy day at Sandwich Beach on Cape Cod, in April, 2006. Earlier that year I’d collected large pebbles from the beach—a place thick with memories for me—and then coated the rocks with photo emulsion and printed them in a darkroom. This is an image of my friend Marguerite, from 1988. I then returned Marguerite’s petrograph, along with many others, to the beach where I’d found them, and let the sea have its way with them.

A storm blew in and waves tossed some of the petrographs ashore, coating them in sand, and took others out to sea, never to be seen again. Still others, like the rock depicting Marguerite, were burrowed into the wet sand and scoured by rushing pebbles. The image above and those below, depicting the same rock seconds earlier and later, were not computer generated in Photoshop: they are the result of the environment absorbing, changing, and ultimately erasing my memories.

My name really is Pamela Petro. I was lucky when it came to naming my medium.

Fleeting Fossils:

An exhibition of petrographs in Northampton, Massachusetts, installed from mid October to mid November, 2007, on the city's sidewalks. In April, 2008 a second phase of the project -- a mosaic pathway of historic images printed on Pennsylvania bluestone -- will be installed on the lawn of the Unitarian Society, next to City Hall.

Exhibitions of large-format photographs of the sidewalk prints will be held throughout the month of April, 2008 at Jackson Street Elementary School, and throughout the month of May at the Lathrop Retirement Community Center, both in Northampton.

Fleeting Fossils was made possible by a 2007-08 fellowship from the Black Rock Arts Foundation of San Francisco, CA.

There are several individuals I'd like to acknowledge without whom this art installation would not be happening: Jackie Coe, Northampton's Elementary School Art director; Meredith Brown, Director of Marketing and Events for the Lathrop Retirement Communities; Kerry Buckley, Executive Director of Historic Northampton; and Bob Reckman, Ned Huntley, and members of Northampton's Department of Public Works Board. You all have my appreciation and deep respect. Thank you.

Aisha's Image, Day One. Aisha is a fourth grader at Jackson Street School.

Aisha's Image, Day Two, in torrential rain

In September 2007 I gave 60 fourth-graders at the Jackson Street School in Northampton, Massachusetts black and white disposable cameras. I also gave cameras to participating residents of the Lathrop Retirement Community, just around the corner from the elementary school. Both young and old photographers had one mission: to record their lives in Northampton—the people, animals, foods, flowers, clothes, and landscapes that they love.

They did a stupendous job. Photographs poured in of city streets, local farms, cats, dogs, rabbits—one gerbil—friends, parents, children, brothers, sisters, dolls, the Red Sox, Spider Man, and my favorite, a waffle iron.

With the help of faculty, staff, and students from Hampshire and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts--especially Dan Wessman, at UMass--from mid October through early-to-mid November I printed the children’s and seniors’ pictures directly on the sidewalks of Northampton, for the whole city to see. The images, or petrographs, were printed directly on concrete—a process that required a generator, a slide projector, a hairdryer, luck, and lots of Liquid Light—and were about two feet by a foot-and-a-half in size.

Exposed to sun, rain, and foot traffic, they only lasted a short time (like the perspectives of the young and old) before they disappeared entirely. The photographs that follow were taken from a day to a week after the sidewalk petrographs were printed. They are in 11 x 14 format and larger, and are currently on display at Jackson Street Elementary School.

Images

Jon B's Image, after two days in the elements. Jon is a fourth grader at Jackson Street School.

Glorianne's Image, the morning after it was printed. Below-freezing temperatures froze the emulsion overnight, resulting in the cracks. Glorianne is also in the fourth grade at JSS.

A digital photo of Glorianne's Image immediately after it was printed.

Shaira's Image a week after it was printed (with encroaching foot). Shaira is a fourth grader as well.

Shaira's Image on the sidewalk in front of the Smith College Art Museum.

Nancy's Image, the morning after it was printed. Nancy is a resident at the Lathrop Retirement Community. (More Lathrop images will be posted in May.)

This petrograph was printed on a walkway between the Hotel Northampton and Gothic Street, in downtown Northampton. The image is in the Howe's Brothers Collection at Historic Northampton; it shows Annie Starks receiving meat from her butcher, James Hill, at her home in Florence. It was taken between 1886-1902. Below is a digital image shot immediately after the petrograph was printed.

Rachel's Image two days after it was printed. Rachel is a fourth grader at Jackson Street School.

Rachel's Image a week later, after it had been partly worn away (and wrinkled) from rain and foot traffic.

Ella M's Image, two days after it was printed. Ella is in the fourth grade at Jackson St. School.

Ella's Image showing the sidewalk location and the shadow of a lamp post.

A digital shot of Ella's Image immediately after it had been printed.

Alex's Image, Day Two. Alex is in the Fourth Grade at Jackson St. School.

Israely's Image, Day Two. Israely's picture was printed next to Alex's. He is also a Fourth Grader at Jackson Street School. Below is a digital shot of Israely's Image immediately after it was printed.

Fleeting Fossils Scrapbook: Images and Notes

The first picture is a test image I made with my assistant, Suzanne Carlson, a student from Hampshire College. The second shows Suzanne watering the print after it’s been developed and fixed.

Log: Fall, 2007

16 October 2007: The launch of the Fleeting Fossils outdoor exhibition! We attempted to make two sidewalk petrograph prints, and had a 50% success rate. The first image, in front of Iris Photo & Digital (164 Main St.), was taken by a fourth grader at Jackson Street School, and came out respectably well. It was our first attempt, and Suzanne and I--along with Jon Coe, who's joined the petrograph team, and a small crowd of onlookers--cheered.

We attempted to print a second image across the street, but had crushingly bad luck when the generator ran out of gas in the middle of our exposure! In the words of Welsh singer/songwriter Katell Keinig, no matter what happens, you've got to love "serendipity--doo--doo--dippity."

This is a test print that Suzanne and I made for the Department of Public Works, on 9 October. The image, of a baby and young girl in front of 38 Fruit Street, in Northampton, is from the Howes Brothers Archives of Historic Northampton, taken c. 1900.

22 October 2007. We continue to scale the learning curve. On 21 Oct. I attempted to make two prints on the corners of Main and State and South Streets with Smith student Mo Speller. Despite our best efforts, sweeping headlights rounding the corners fogged the prints. The following night Suzanne and I were back at it in Pulaski Park--an evening in which printing merged into performance art.

First a gentleman spotted our duct-tape-and-trash-bag light box, thought we were homeless, and tried to give us money; then a reporter and video team arrived from WABC-40; next came a policeman on a bike, who hadn't realized we had permission to print; and then, finally, a skunk visited. We experimented with filters and so didn't get the best images, but nonetheless made recognizable prints.

This is either a picture of Jacob by Liam, or Liam by Jacob, taken at Jackson Street School. Either Liam or Jacob has a sweater wrapped around his head.

This smiling couple was taken by Stan, a resident at the Lathrop Retirement Community.

Suzanne's feet emerging from the light box (aka, "the contraption"). Note the slide projector on top.

25 October 2007: A terrific evening of printing! Suzanne and I created two prints side-by-side at the foot of Main Street, just before the railroad overpass (between Moshi Moshi and Del Raye restaurants).

This picture was taken by Varn, a resident at Lathrop. We over-developed the print, but the image--three well-dressed ladies at the Lathrop Community Center--is quite legible.

28 October 2007: Another good night of printing. Renowned calligrapher Tom Ferguson and I made two prints across the street from the previous set, at the foot of Main Street just before the railroad bridge (between the Toasted Owl and Thai Garden).

This picture of a gentleman in a lawn chair was taken by Phyllis, a Lathrop resident.

This petrograph, of three women participating in an inter-generational dance troupe, was taken by Ev, also a resident of the Lahtrop Retirement Community.

29 October 2008: Last night Suzanne, Jon Coe, and I made 2 prints in front of the Smith Art Museum, on the Elm Street sidewalk. The first one, just below, came out splendidly. The second image was stippled--perhaps we didn't dry the emulsion long enough, or the cold prevented it from drying--and obscured the subject's face. My apologies to Hunter, who took the picture!

These are Hunter's images. On the left is his snapshot; on the right is the petrograph that didn't quite work out...Sorry, Hunter!

30 October 2007: Another excellent night of printing, this time on Pearl Street, opposite East Side Grill and directly in front of the New York Shop Exchange. The digital picture of Ella's M's image is in the gallery above.

This picture was taken at Tregelly Farm by Ron, a bus driver for the Lathrop Retirement Community.

Suzanne in full protective gear, about to develop Ella's image.

4 November 2007: The best night of printing yet! Suzanne and I produced these two petrographs on the sidewalk opposite the Iron Horse, on Center Street. It may have been the last warm night, and there were many appreciative passersby. The digital rendering of Israely's image is shown above.

7 November 2007: I guess I was getting too cocky...Last night I tried to print alone on Masonic Street, but was too close to the corner of Center. Once again the first print was completely fogged by sweeping headlights--so much so that I didn't attempt the second. So much for learning from lessons. Hopefully Suzanne and I will redeem the mistake on the 8th!

The evening was saved, however, by a passerby. He stopped to see what I was doing, but I told him the print hadn't come out. "Oh," he said, "there're some other people printing on the sidewalks here in town. You should talk to them. Their prints are really cool." I looked at him and thought, "How many people do you think are out in 35 degree weather, making petrographs on the sidewalks of Northampton?" But I didn't say that. I just thanked him for the tip.

8 November 2007: All is redeemed. Suzanne and I made two superb prints at Roundhouse Plaza, just around the corner from the Northampton bus station. It was the coldest night yet: my car thermometer read 33 degrees. This slowed the developing time dramatically, yet the cold proved to work in our favor. We had more time to control the process, adding fix selectively where needed; when the images finally appeared, the rush of magic made my heart skip beats. The digital image of Glorianne's picture is shown above.

11 November 2007: A trifecta! Despite the bitter cold, Suzanne and I printed three images in a row on the walkway between Gothic and King Streets (just off Gothic, between the courthouse buildings). The theme was transportation, with the images featuring skateboards and scooters; a car wash; and an picture from Historic Northampton of a horse and wagon, taken around the turn of the century. (The digital version of the historic image is shown above.)

In the way of things, just as we're hitting our stride as printers, the installation is coming to an end. We have only two more sessions, on 12 and 13 November. It's been a great ride, but we'll be glad to come in from the cold...

Three triumphant skateboard and scooter riders, taken by Jon B., a 4th grader at Jackson St. School. Despite the fuzziness, I like the painterly effect of this image.

This summery image was taken by Arthur, a resident at the Lathrop Retirement Community. The mistiness on the righthand side is spray from the car washers' hoses!

13 November 2007: Our final night of printing! (We had planned to print on the 12th as well, but were thwarted by rain.) Suzanne and I made two farewell prints on the horseshoe sidewalk in front of the Veterans' Memorial (next to City Hall) in downtown Northampton. The images appeared as the temperature dropped, and both turned out beautifully.

Suzanne developed our farewell image. Of the two of us, Suzanne proved to have steelier nerves when it came to developing. (The question was always 'When to fix?' Suzanne was good at waiting till the last moment, before the image became too dark; I sometimes panicked, and fixed too soon...).

Here's the petrograph printing team: Suzanne on the left, Pam on the right. I want to publically commend Suzanne: from the first test print she's been the best printing partner I could have hoped for. Smart, resourceful, problem-solving, reliable, good-natured, and intrepid. Thank you, Suzanne!

PUBLICITY

One of the first well-wishers on October 16th was Paolo Mastrangelo, who made a short video of the installation: http://northamptonist.blogspot.com/2007/10/petrographs-on-sidewalk-of-main-st.html.

A page of petrographs are featured on Rockland Colloid's website, www.rockaloid.com/petro.html.

WABC-40 aired a story on Fleeting Fossils on the 11:00 News on 22 October; it may be available at http://www.wggb.com/.

WWLP (Channel 5) News broadcast a story on the 5pm news on 23 October called "Local Artist Uses Untraditional Canvas in Downtown Northampton." You can view it at http://www.wwlp.com/Global/story.asp?s=7254805

The lead story in The Daily Hampshire Gazette's Living Section on 24 October hightlights the project and is called "Fleeting Images." See http://www.gazettenet.com/.

Smith College's online newspaper, The Gate, has a mention of Fleeting Fossils: http://www.smith.edu/news/

SPONSORS

Fleeting Fossils is sponsored by a number of generous, friendly, and imaginative local and regional companies, including:

Harman Technology, Cambridge, MA (http://www.harmantechnology.com/

Historic Northampton, Northampton, MA (http://www.historic-northampton.org/)

Hunts Photo, Video, and Digital, Melrose, MA (http://www.huntsphotoandvideo.com/)

Iris Photo & Digital, Northampton, MA (http://www.iris-photo.com/)

Rockland Colloid Corporation, Piermont, NY (http://www.rockaloid.com/)

Sprint Photo Systems, Pawtucket, RI (http://www.sprintsystems.com/)

Valley Motor Sports, Northampton, MA (http://www.valleymotorsports.com/)

2007-10-10T13:02:00.000-07:00

Memory Meets Stone,

Northampton Center for the Arts,
8-30 January 2008

Ray, Snowstorm Installation, February 2007

Marguerite and Tom, Mill River Installation III, July 2006

Memory Meets Stone was held at the Northampton Center for the Arts during the month of January, 2008, and drew on several installations that I created between 2005 and 2007. Two employed sea and river water as weathering agents, and the third drew on winter weather: cold, snow, and glaring sunlight.

The exhibition featured images from each of these installations, as well as one or two photographs and petrographs from the Fleeting Fossils installations.

The Mill River

The first of the featured installations took place in the Mill River, in Haydenville, Massachusetts, between November 2005 and July 2006. I gathered river rocks, printed them, and returned them to the river in three different installations. During the first two the water level was low, and the petrographs nestled quietly into the river bottom, hardly changed at all by their environment.

In the third the water was higher, and flowing rapidly. The printed rocks were scoured and tumbled, changing appearance dramatically over the course of a three-day installation as I photographed them in different depths, light, and states of deterioration.

On the fourth day, when I went to the river to retrieve the rocks, most had disappeared. Scavenging is as natural as erosion, so I let go of my anger and called it a fitting end to the installation.

A young woman and three children were swimming in the river, near the dam. “Are you the one who put the faces on the rocks?” the mother asked. I nodded, as her young daughter came and took my hand excitedly, leading me to the water. “Look, look!” she cried, “today the rocks have faces. I always thought the river was magic, and now I know it is!”

Sandwich Beach, Cape Cod

The first image above shows a petrograph of me as a baby on a Cape Cod beach. The slight signs of distress betray the fact that it was in the sea through one full tide cycle, from low tide through high, back to low again. The next two images depict the same petrograph in the sea as the tide was rippling out, toward the end of the installation.

From April through July, 2006, I made a series of installations at Sandwich Beach, on Cape Cod. (During the summer installations I became known as The Rock Lady. Whenever children saw me coming, lugging bags of petrographs, they’d shout, “Run! Run for your lives! It’s the Rock Lady!” and tear away over the sand. I’d love to know what stories they were spinning…)

In the first installation, in April, the petrographs were tossed and tumbled during a storm.

And a cairn at the water’s edge was dismantled by the tide…

In the second installation I was too ambitious, and tried to monitor several small cairns at once: two built on jetty rocks near the tideline, and another series in an inlet in a tidal marsh. I lost everything to the sea.

For the third installation I dug out my parents' old Agfa slides from the 1960s of my family's beach vacations on Cape Cod. I then projected the slides and re-shot the scenes in black-and-white, and created a series of petrographs with forty-year-old images. These petrographs were in the sea through a full tidal exchange. Some emerged unscathed; others images nearly disintegrated.

It was a hot day and I wished I'd brought my bathing suit. Eventually two little girls, Sophie and Madeline, persuaded me to swim with them in my clothes. They helped me retrieve the rocks; so these images are dedicated to them.

Dave and Julius fishing, Cape Cod jetty, 1962

June, Craig, and Pam on an inner tube, Cape Cod, 1961

Storytellers’ Cairn, Childs Park

In late winter, 2007, I created a cairn of over 50 petrographs at Childs Park, in Northampton. The rocks were composed of silvery mica-schist from the Goshen Stone Quarry here in Western Massachusetts, and were printed with images of oral storytellers from the American South.

A bit of history: In 1999 I did research in the South for my travel narrative, Sitting up with the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South (Flamingo, 2001, London; Arcade, 2002, New York). I met with oral storytellers, photographed them, and asked them to tell me tales of their homes. The book records their stories verbatim, along with my tales of encountering the tellers. In the Childs Park installation the southern storytellers’ were voiceless, but their images told beautiful new tales of their encounters with a northern environment, and sparked tale-telling in all who encountered their cairn.

I built the cairn in a public park where it was exposed to rain, sun, and snow, and again recorded changes day-by-day. During the process passersby frequently touched and disassembled the imaged rocks. Their interventions were revelatory: setting aside the outer, cracked and faded petrographs, they discovered that those sheltered inside, printed with images that reached further back in time, remained vivid: a model, perhaps, of the way memory works as we age.

Kwame in snowstorm cairn; Kwame after cairn had been disassembled

This color image is of Kwame's petrograph after it had been buried in a cairn and snowstorm for three weeks. It is one of the examples of oxidation bleeding from the rock (mica-schist) through the emulsion to color the image itself.

Ray in flurries, following cairn disassemblage

Ray with harmonica, tree cairn

Ray, Storytellers' carin

Cornelia in snow, tree cairn

Storyteller and her mom, after cairn had been disassembled

Petrographs evoke the cycle of life and death and may be seen as premonitions of fossils-to-be. They celebrate our physical connection to the earth by suggesting how place shapes us—the rocks’ ancient histories, formed and distorted by glaciers, seas, fire, and ice, become the miniature landscapes that gives mass and form to our memories—and how everything we do imprints, for better or worse, on the landscape.