Deja Vu

I am once again sitting in the Island Grocery on a cloudy, grey day. Monday and Tuesday were absolutely gorgeous days for shooting, though, so I can't really complain. As soon as I arrived on Monday afternoon I had the chance to go out on my former boss (from the IG)'s boat. My plan was to focus on shooting just light and water without much else, if anything, in the frame. There's hardly a better setting from which to carry out this assignment than a little Boston Whaler. There are definitely perks to returning to places and people you know! (Though, of course, I am loving discovering new sites as well.)

I've also been working on honing my less than fabulous watercolor skills and think I'm finally making progress! Hurrah! Photos might be posted later but I may change my mind once I look back at the pieces. So don't hold your breath.

I'm about to head back to Brunswick and am anticipating beginning to experiment with the cyanotype process tomorrow. I'm getting pretty excited about that, though I'm sure it will involve lots of trial-and-error and tweaking before I can really get it to work. Fingers crossed that it's sunny out tomorrow because UV light will be pretty key to my success.

Below are some light/water photos from the last couple days. They're all in black-and-white because that's more similar to what they will look like as cyanotypes, should I choose to actually use any of them.

South Bristol Sun

I'm sitting in the Island Grocery (where I worked two summers ago) drinking hot coffee and browsing through my latest set of photos. After a long day of driving to and all around South Portland and Cape Elizabeth, on Monday I escaped Brunswick for a few days to drive up here to South Bristol. This is the place that made me first fall in love with Maine summers, so I have to include it in this summer's project. I also used this as a base from which to shoot some other towns nearby (Bristol, Pemaquid and Rockland). It's been a wonderful few days and I've enjoyed looking at some of these extraordinarily familiar sites and scenes from a new perspective. Below are a few shots from my first day here, mainly around the South Bristol Harbor and the swing bridge. I'll post the photos from Pemaquid and Rockland in a bit.

End of Week 1

I'm concluding week 1 a little more sunburned than I began it, and with a few more paint-stained items of clothing but otherwise, no complaints! I'm feeling good about the progress I've made and am excited for more adventures next week. On Wednesday I drove to the end of Route 24, over Orr's and Bailey's Islands to Land's End where the road dead-ends at the Ocean. It was finally a gorgeous day after a few days of rain. I shot quite a bit out there and then pulled over several times on the way back and took a few walks so I could capture all the beautiful views along the way. I also stopped at Cundy's Harbor on the way back which was a sleepy little harbor, but has several cute general stores and a coastal photography gallery (which was closed at the time but I intend to go back). Thursday I ventured down to the end of 123, very similar to 24 but much bumpier, which took me to South Harpswell. Another beautiful day with glassy water but somewhat ominous skies. Not many people were out other than a few dogwalkers and a father teaching his kids how to catch fish (fabulous eaves-dropping material!). Took a billion photos and also played with my watercolors some. Today was a water color day too. I still don't have anything I'm happy enough with to post on this blog, but I'm learning a lot. Oil paint is so much more forgiving! I made myself do lots of exercises to try to learn some better technique so that I can really get a handle on it by the time I start trying to figure out how to incorporate the painting with the cyanotypes. But there's lots to do before that happens! Today my plans to go to the Giant Steps were foiled due to scattered showers as soon as I arrived at my destination. I changed plans and drove back to Land's End where I could see the ocean from the parking lot and set up shop in the trunk of my car. It stopped raining very soon after that, but it actually would have made a cozy little studio, so now I'm prepared for the inevitable next time (since the weather here tends to be pretty unpredictable). Anyway, that's enough for now. Below is a random selection of shots from the last couple days. (Click on the photos to see larger versions. They're much more interesting that way.)

First Attempts

The most important conclusion of day 1 on this project was that I pretty much have the greatest summer job in the world. Other observations were that I need to stock up on bug spray, find some shoes that have enough traction to prevent me from slipping on wet rocks and breaking myself or my camera, and buy an external harddrive because if I took 400 pictures in about 2 hours on a cloudy day who knows what damage I'll do when the sun finally comes out. I'm midway into Day 2 and using the March-like 50 degree, grey, breezy day to reacquaint myself with photoshop, set up a little studio space for myself on the 3rd floor of McLellan, and do some research.

Yesterday I started off the day by picking up my camera from getting cleaned and I am thrilled to be rid of the splotches of dusts I've been editing out of my abroad pictures for the last few months (hurrah!). I also stocked up on some more watercolor supplies and discovered that Art Mart (Maine College of Art's supply store in Portland) is awesome and also has a cafe inside. I decided to start shooting despite the cloudy skies, so I headed out to the Coastal Studies center on Orr's Island. I want to explore a lot of different places along the Maine coast but since this center is the basis for the fellowship I figured it's a pretty good place to start. There are several different trails so I walked a loop that included the Pine Needle Path, Brewer Cove trail, and Long Cove Loop (see map below) and stopped to photograph at various points along the way.

For this first week I'm trying to collect a lot of different shots of the coast so that I have a lot to work with when I begin to convert the photos into cyanotypes. At that point I'll narrow my focus and begin to see what works best with that medium. I've been playing around on photoshop to see what some of my shots will look like as cyanotypes> Here are some examples. Most shots are from Brewer Cove and Harpswell sound. They'll look pretty different when they are actual cyanotypes, not just digital ones, but this is helping me to visualize the effect.

Coastal Studies Fellowship: Summer 2011

After spending a semester abroad in Rome, I am back in Maine for the summer. I have a Rusack Coastal Studies Fellowship through which I am working on an art project I proposed involving artistic portrayals of the coast. As many of you realized from my abroad blog, blogging regularly is not exactly my forte, but considering this is potentially the only time in my life I'll get to spend all my time and energy focused on one art project, I want to make sure to keep a concrete record of the process. I am doing this for my own benefit and because I want to be able to share this project with all of you. Sometimes it's hard to explain what exactly I'm working on in a short, passing conversation or without visuals so this summer's posts (on what used to by my photography class blog) will hopefully fill in the blanks. To start out with, below is a somewhat modified version of my project proposal explaining my plan for the project as it stands now, the evening before my first day of work.

Light and Water as Both Subject and Medium in Portraying Maine’s Coast

Works of art portraying the coast of Maine inevitably fall into the context of a long-standing tradition of Maine seascapes. From early on, artists sought out Maine’s then sparsely populated coast as a summer refuge. Soon, however, summering and painting in Maine became the new vogue, drawing artists from Winslow Homer to Edward Hopper to the many artists working in Brunswick today, eager to tackle the coast as their subject matter. Because of this, it can be easy to view the subject of Maine’s coast as overdone or trite, but at the same time there is something irresistible about it. The coast of Maine is a unique place in itself and each encounter with it is different from the next. I have found that the coast exudes a certain powerful sense of place, through its specific atmosphere and aesthetic, which I strive to be able to capture through my project.

Two of the most significant forces at play on the coast, that frame and enliven the environment, are light and water. They are constantly shifting, affecting their surroundings and interacting with each other in various ways based on the time of day, the weather, and the time of year. In this project, I hope to observe, discover and depict how these key but ever-changing elements shape the coastal environment as well as the people interacting with it. I propose to do so by exploring light and water as both the subjects of my art and as parts of the artistic process of portraying them. To do so I will combine the photographic process of “cyanotyping” with watercolor painting.

Cyanotypes are photographs made through an early, alternative photographic process in which the artist uses natural light and water to develop photographs. The result is a white image on a deep blue background, as opposed to the typical film photography developing process that produces black and white images. Using the sun and water to create prints allows for the elements that shape the coast to directly shape the art as well. I will experiment with this process using both digitally enlarged negatives of photographs I take and the photogram technique in which the sun makes a direct impression of objects or environmental specimens placed on photosensitive paper. This will allow my representations of the coast to range from entirely representational to more abstract. I got a chance to experiment a bit with cyanotypes in Mike Kolster’s Photography and Color class in the Fall 2010 semester, but barely scratched the surface of possibilities that the process allows. That project piqued my curiosity to explore the process more.

In addition, I am interested in adding another dimension to my portrayals of the coast by combining or enhancing them with watercolors. The use of water in watercolor painting lends a certain level of fluidity and consequently expressiveness to the medium. I am not interested in simply coloring cyanotypes with watercolor pigments, but instead combining the two art forms in ways that allow for flexible and expressive representations of the subject matter, depending on which medium seems fit for which aspects of the environment. I intend to explore how I can make water and light play off each other in my works as they do on the coast in various ways. I hope that by focusing on these two major forces working on the coast as key parts of the art and the process, I can capture both a sense of the ephemeral qualities of these forces and of the real, physical presence of these elements that create such a unique environment.

I will begin the project by experimenting with the effects I can get with each medium and will then explore ways to combine the two to enhance the works. Through such trial and error, discovery of what approaches work best, and regular consultations and with my faculty mentor, I will develop a more solid plan for the final body of work. I intend to explore a variety of different coastal areas in Maine in addition to the Coastal Studies Center. I will explore a series of coastal harbors and towns, specifically including Rutherford Island, a small fishing island I know well, that hosts both summer residents and year-round lobstermen, where three bodies of water, the ocean, a cove and the Damariscotta River, all come together.

I am intrigued by the possibilities this project affords for me to combine my interests in photography and painting. I have always considered myself a painter, first and foremost, but my coursework has led me to explore photography further than I expected it would. The two media inform and complement each other, but also allow for different types of interpretations and portrayals. As I delve further into each process, I sometimes find it difficult to keep my photographic and painterly sensibilities separate. I am excited to attempt to reconcile the two and let them bleed together in a way that suits the subject matter, an environment that carries such a visual and emotional impact for me.