“Beyond”

“Beyond”

A trip to Mentor Headlands last Wednesday afternoon yielded an unexpected gift of the landscape. The beach east of the Headlands has transformed since my last visit over twenty-five years ago. Low dunes have developed as a root system of grass has created a carpet where dunes can form.

Rolling, richly textured fields of switchgrass bend to rhythms of lake wind, catching light and emotion, bringing to mind the sense of “Saudade”, a cultural constituent deeply embedded in Portuguese and Spanish art and music (Fado) and a perfect word for the nostalgia sweeping the nation in this moment. We, many of us, long for the recent past, one that now seems distant and possibly never the same, never attainable. The lighthouse (Fairport Harbor) just over the horizon is leading us metaphorically, paradoxically, back to the light.

“Pastels, Schweitzer Marsh”

“Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them.” John Ruskin

I love this quote by John Ruskin, the great Victorian critic of the arts. His compelling observation has resonated with me over the years as I’ve spent much time trying to see and photograph the intrinsic beauty of the landscape. It should come as no surprise that he was a great admirer of William (JMW) Turner, especially his luminous paintings of the sea and other natural settings.

Taken at sunrise in early May, this ethereal scene reminds me of Turner’s ability to see and capture nature’s sublime through his use of color. As with so many of his paintings in later years (i.e. 1835-1850), where light appears to dissolve the physical objects in the landscape, so too are the treelines and lily pads in this image subsumed into a spectrum of color.

“Still Point”  16″x24″   Collector’s Edition of 10     C.G. Baker, 2020     

Is there anyone who hasn’t tired of the myriad reed and grass photos, most composed in early morning mist or afternoon fog? As a child, over 60 years ago, I recall a black and white photo from “Life” magazine featuring reeds reflecting on a smooth lake. With my mother’s hand-me-down camera I wasted lots of film and her patience trying to replicate that image in a neighbor’s pond. Amateurish would be a very generous description of those photos. Ever since, I’ve shied away from the reed pictures that have seduced infinite photographers and generated infinite images. The few I’ve attempted have been unoriginal at best.

“Toward Heaven Still”

In a couple of his poems (“After Apple Picking and “Birches”), Robert Frost summoned both imagery and metaphor through the phrase, “toward heaven” and “toward heaven still.” I’ve often thought this towering pin oak, anchored in less than three feet of water at the north end of Schweitzer marsh, was “pointed toward heaven still”; ascending from its base, reaching into the firmament.

Exploring the marsh, beech groves and hawthorn gauntlets as young boys of ten or eleven, my friends and I could always spot this tree above the others and orient ourselves. The pin oaks pictured here were already dead and ghostly by the mid 50’s, almost seventy years ago, yet the grove “still” stands.  More than I can say for myself at times.

“Like to the blackbird at break of day arising … “

“Like to the blackbird at break of day arising … “The title, inspired and only slightly corrupted, was appropriated from a line in Shakespeare’s 29th sonnet:

 Like to the lark at break of day arising,
From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

This is a companion to the marsh image (“Schweitzer Marsh, April Sunrise”) posted three days ago. The sun, still diffused by early mist, was only about twenty minutes above the horizon.

Returning from its winter migration, a redwing blackbird poses atop a pin-oak remnant, his song rising celestially in its distinctive timbre and the bubbling beauty of its chiming chords.

“Untitled”

“Untitled II”

My preoccupation with geese traces to childhood and the scarcity of what now has become abundant. This is the second in a series. Note, the gander trails the female always protecting his territory.

What works (I think) about this image is the context (marsh sedge in the foreground) and the center focused composition.