My very good friends, the artist Gail Hill (Website) and her husband Hal Kay from Toronto couldn't make it this fall for a visit to Martha's Vineyard. Via emails and text messages Gail's been bugging me to at least share some pictures with her, since she couldn't be here.

So, here we go:

Oak Bluffs, taken two days after the mass shootings in Las Vegas

I photograph most days while here, usually centering on a specific place, and go back over and over. This time it is Oak Bluffs and it is difficult because it is so very familiar. I have been trying to see it with new eyes, as if for the first time.

Gail Hill is a very special person, with an active art career that spans photography and painting as well as playing a large role as a career advisor and mentor  (Creative Self) to many many in Toronto. She also is a wonderful cook.

Menemsha

I occasionally photograph from my kayak, as above. This falls into the "high risk" category but I try to pick calm water and slight wind. This from Poucha Pond above the famous Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick where May Jo Kopechne lost her life in the car Ted Kennedy was driving one night after a party.

Let me tell you about this past Thursday. 

Note: There will be a few posts on this one topic. This is a project that combines aerial photographs with ground-based imagery.

While Texas was bracing for the arrival of Hurricane Harvey and Donald Trump was about to pardon former sheriff Joe Arpaio I was in Vermont photographing the Connecticut River. Far less newsworthy I admit but nevertheless big in my world. It was quite a day with two distinct parts to it.

Warning: the pictures shown here simply aren't going to do anything for you by seeing them on your phone. I make pictures that are way up there in terms of resolution, sharpness, tonal range and color rendition. When you do get to see them on a good color display you can click on an image and it will expand to a larger rendering.

Part 1

Photographing The River is a project that has crept up on me. There was no thunderbolt of inspiration, no big epiphany here, just the quiet realization that every time I drove over it, or kayaked down it I was fascinated with what it showed me on its banks and what went on behind them.

This harkens back to my project called Tom's Neck from a few years ago. Very often on a shore or embankment on a river, stands a row of trees, acting as a wall or a barrier to what is behind them.

So this summer I've been photographing the river, usually from one shore pointing across at the opposite one, although sometimes from a bridge. Thursday I went up in a plane to get at it from above, starting at RT 2 in Turner's Falls, MA and flying up to Bellows Falls, VT and back. 

My day started here:

at the little airstrip at Turner's Falls.

The day was perfect.

Right away the river opened up to reveal its secrets. Of course, it was magnificent:The Connecticut River is an "old" river along southern Vermont and northern Massachusetts. No rapids or fast water and usually quite wide, with a few islands along the way. The river valley through here is heavy-duty farming country, with large crops of hay and corn but also squash, tomatoes, melons and even hops for beer:

In late August it all comes to fruition. The corn is high and they're practically giving tomatoes away.

As the pilot and I skimmed along at about 800 feet above the water in a high winged Cessna it was easy to follow the river as it meandered north. Since I was in the right seat, I pointed out the open window with my camera at the eastern bank on the way up and the western bank on the way down.

As we approached Brattleboro the river widened out into marshes:

Next up? More aerial photographs of the river and then on to part two of my day. My trip in the excursion boat the Lady Bea with a group from a nursing home.

Turf Farm near Greenfield, MA

What? When confronted with the amazing landscape of Iceland I am not going to point a camera at it?

Current thinking is that landscape is over in art photography. That it's all been done.Well, not by me it hasn't and your loss, I believe, if you don't care to look at landscape work. I do look at it and do make landscape photographs but it's not the only thing I care about. Tale a look at the gallery page of my site for examples. And yes, I see a great deal of quite bad landscape photography. Last week I drove through some truly remarkable country, up and over a couple of mountain passes on gravel roads. I'd be a fool not to photograph it.

Take your breath away places. Have to stop places. Game of Thrones kind of places.

Not for iPhones, this. Long lens, tripod, low iso, best aperture and extreme care.

As I begin to work the files now back at home,  go through the various days I was shooting, one thing prevails. Iceland is incredible. I know, it is touristy and overrun with photographers of all kinds,

serious and perhaps not so serious

My approach?  Always seek out a quieter place, someplace off the path traveled  by everyone else

maybe at the top of a mountain pass up in the clouds.

This is "reactive" work in that I am reacting to something in front of me that is spectacular and perhaps moving.  Grand landscapes have done that to people forever, I am sure.

Look at the British, American and Italian romantic landscape painters, for instance. Those lush and over-the-top utopian paintings just slay me. Garden of Eden and paradise on earth paintings that are masterful and consummate.

(Sorry: no attribution. Seen three years ago in Italy. Do not remember the artist.)

I am printing the Iceland landscape pictures now and will place them on the website soon. More to come from Iceland, land of my dreams.

If you read the blog regularly you know that I am now in northern Iceland teaching a one week workshop at the Baer Art Center outside of Hofsos.

Class started today.

Latest chaos: Priebus fired, earlier in the week Spicer resigning, a new Communications Director, transgenders out of the military, repealed Obama health care on and then off, McCain and cancer, on and on. 

Little or no Trump-created mayhem here, simply this:

taken this morning about 1 am. Or this:

which is quite literally the view out my bedroom window. No McConnell, no Kelly Anne Conway, none of them. In a different country, not so far from the Arctic Circle and so far from all that.

Do we realize how immersive this has been, this constant barrage of craziness we've been subjected to? It is a real pleasure to be able to step back from all the DC-based chaos. 

I am here because I applied for and was awarded an artist in residency in 2013. I was then asked back to teach for a week. 

We will talk about simplification, essentials, foundations, trust, boundaries and limits, goals and aspirations, form versus content, relevance, insecurities, barriers, accessibility, one's creative practice and a whole bunch of other things. We will break it down and build it back up, work to understand ourselves better through our work, to grapple with layers like peeling an onion, to go deeper, to confront time.

What I have in class is 9 seriously accomplished Icelandic women who are highly involved in the arts and culture of this country. Some are career photographers and  their work frequently exhibited. This, of course, sets the bar high on me as their teacher. Bring it on.

The trick, of course, it to speak from one's base of knowledge and experience. To address the issues at hand, the concerns and the obstacles confronted in one's own career towards an understanding of what obstructs and hinders others'. What do you want to achieve and can you address paths to get there? Here in Iceland can I help with that or is this a struggle they must solve on their own? One approach is to spend some time writing it down, your artist philosophy, if you will. Brief, maybe a paragraph. A life immersed in Creative Practice is to assume your own innate creative capabilities, the foundation of your aesthetic lives across a broad array of life's mundane activities, chores, jobs, family, relationships and so on. And as you well know, what are your inputs, your inspirations? Is it music, other visual arts, what you read or discuss. Here with this around us, is it where we are physically for the week?

We will see as the week's time together has just started.

Looking forward and stay tuned.

Ever hear of Louis Kahn? A few years before contemporary architecture moved into its Postmodernism, Deconstructivist, Post-Post Modernism, etc. phases
Louis Kahn, one of our most brilliant architects, designed late in his career a library for Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH in 1970 that stands as one of his greatest pieces.

A friend and I took the day and headed up there from Boston,  11/2 hours away.  Had a good lunch too, at the Green Bean Restaurant, right in town (highly recommended).

With some ideas from the Coliseum in Rome, the library, named the Class of 1945 Library, is a brick and glass cube that integrates with the other 19th century buildings nearby on campus, also in brick.

Minimal and understated, the exterior stands in service to the library's function, almost neutral, as a counter to what's inside.

Which is a tour de force of innovation, engineering, warmth and solemnity.

Huge supporting concrete blocks formed as large circles or openings letting in light, keeping the space open and spacious. Circles within a cube: simply breathtaking and elegant.

Look up and you find this:

With a prevailing palette of concrete, oak and beige carpet with a little hint of marble  thrown in for good measure, the building exudes quality, class and impeccable pedigree,  appropriate to this high-end and rather exclusive boarding school.

We were there in June so things were slow, virtually no students at all. But I can't imagine the library being raucous and loud, as it felt more like being in a tomb or place of worship to me. Whispers came almost without thought, in regards to the  place itself, a kind of reverence and respect for being in a place of  truly exceptional design.

I found a few of the details wonderful:

Yes, but Neal, I hear you asking, isn't this a Photo Blog? Well, yes, it is but in something like what I call a creative life (same category when I wrote last spring about Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water) inspiration comes in all shapes and sizes. This is about input and seeing what happens from it and, mixed in, sheer joy. 

It is my pleasure to bring this to you. 

Want to read more about Kahn? There's a great piece in the New York Review of Books about him, here, written by Martin Filler.