Celestial Realm

 Eighteen Disciples of Buddha by Wang Wusheng, 1984

"Dogen, one of Japan’s foremost medieval Zen masters, wrote in the "Sansui-kyo" chapter of the "Shobogenzo" that “to view sansui (Chinese style mountain-water landscape painting), is to meet yourself before you were born.”

The self before birth is a self beyond time and space. Dogen, wrote that this self is a ‘formless self’ no one has ever seen. This yet unformed self is the essence of sansui. A depiction of something beyond time and space whose appearance is yet unformed.

A dark mass of mountains is not dead space but the very soul of the living mountains. The white sky in his photographs is not an empty sky  but a sky shown after the passing of a raging storm, now bathed in sunlight."  - Seigo Matsuoka in "Photographic Sansui"

Wang Wusheng was born in 1945 in the city of Wuhu in Anhui Province, China. He graduated from Anhui University's School of Physics. Beginning in 1973, Wusheng worked as a photographer for a news magazine in Anhui Province. He studied at the Art Institute of Nihon University in Japan beginning in 1983 and studied for three years at the Tokyo Arts University. Wusheng currently works as a fine art photographer in Tokyo. 

Peaks and Clouds, by Wang Wusheng, 2004

For more than three decades, Wang Wusheng has been captivated by the beauty of Mount Huangshan, also called Yellow Mountain. Located in the southern part of the Anhui province in northern China, Mount Huangshan has often been described as the world's most beautiful and enchanting mountain. Over many centuries, this mountain, with its seventy-two peaks, has been the subject of Chinese landscape painters, whose singular works are so haunting make it appear impossible for these mountains to exist in nature. Inspired by the legacy of these paintings, Wusheng has sought to portray Mount Huangshan in his own way, expressing his "inner worlds" through this scenic wonder.

Wusheng captures mist-shrouded granite peaks emerging from an ever-changing veil of clouds, sculptural craggy rocks on lofty cliffs and weathered, oddly shaped pine trees. He records the appearance of Mount Huangshan in all seasons and at various times of day. As one critic says, "Wang's pictures are gorgeous, but their beauty does not come directly from the natural scenery. Rather, the mountain's natural wonders have been transformed into artistic spectacles through the artist's commitment to the medium of black-and-white photography, his insistent pursuit of dynamic movement and metamorphic images, and his deep emotional engagement with his subject. His mountain peaks are often densely dark -a kind of velvet darkness that seems full of color."

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Georgia O'Keeffe

 Georgia O'Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz, 1920

For several decades Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was a major figure in American art who, remarkably, maintained her independence from shifting artistic trends. She painted prolifically, and almost exclusively, the flowers, animal bones, and landscapes around her studios in Lake George, New York, and New Mexico, and these subjects became her signature images. She remained true to her own unique artistic vision and created a highly individual style of painting, which synthesized the formal language of modern European abstraction and the subjects of traditional American pictorialism.

Georgia O'Keeffe at work by Anselm Adams, 1937

Her vision, which evolves during the first twenty years of her career, continued to inform her later work and was based on finding the essential, abstract forms in the subjects she painted. With exceptionally keen powers of observation and great finesse with a paintbrush, she recorded subtle nuances of color, shape, and light. Subjects such as landscapes, flowers, and bones were explored in series, or more accurately, in a series of series. Generally, she tested the pictorial possibilities of each subject in a sequence of three or four pictures produced in succession during a single year. But sometimes a series extended over several years, or even decades, and resulted in as many as a dozen variations.

 Georgia O'Keeffe in Glen Canyon by Todd Webb, 1961

By the mid-1920s, after an initial period of experimentation with various media, techniques, and imagery, O'Keeffe had already developed the personal style of painting that would characterize her mature work. During the 1930s she added an established repertory of color, forms, and themes that reflected the influence of her visits to New Mexico. For the most part, her work of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s relied on those images already present in her art by the mid-1940s.

Artist Georgia OKeeffe with Judith Searle at her home studio
on the Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu,
New Mexico by Basil Langton, 1971

O'Keeffe's flower paintings have often been called erotic, which is not exactly wrong, but the emphasis is misplaced. It would be surprising if an artist with her passion for the transcendent did not make use erotically charged imagery. Reducing her flowers to symbols of female sexuality is however, a trivializing mistake, for the sexual particulars matter less in art with the aspiration that the vivid and more universal sensation of a joyful release into another world beyond the usual distinctions. O'Keeffe's interest in the scale of transcendence let her to violate certain boundaries. Not only did she make the large small and the small large, but she took serious chances with color, sometimes upsetting conventions of visual harmony in order to startle the eye into new kinds of seeing. She liked to stress visual edges that have metaphysical implications: between night and day, earth and sky, life and death. She was not afraid of the large, symbolic reverberation; her bones often seem strangely alive, the flowers of the desert.

Artist Georgia OKeeffe at her home
on the Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu,
New Mexico by Basil Langton, 1971

Through her repeated reworkings of familiar themes she produced an enormous body of work that in intensely focused and unusually coherent. Some 1,000 paintings, an equal number of drawings and watercolors on paper, and just a few sculptures, have been documented in a catalogue raisonne of the artist's work published in 1999, and still others are unrecorded because they were destroyed by the artist.

Georgia O'Keeffe at her home on the Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu,
New Mexico by Basil Langton, 1971

The subjects O'Keeffe painted were taken from life and related either generally or specifically to the places where she had been. Through her art she explored the minute details of a setting's or an object's physical appearance and thereby came to know it even better. Often her pictures convey a highly subjective impression of an image, although it is depicted in a straightforward and realistic manner. Such subjective interpretations were frequently colored by important events in the artist's personal and professional life. Their impact on her work was often unconscious, as the artist acknowledged late in life.

Georgia O'Keeffe at her home on the Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico by Basil Langton, 1971

Georgian O'Keeffe continued to paint into the 1970s, her almost complete loss of eyesight and ill health during the last fifteen years of her life significantly curtailed her artistic productivity. Her eye problems began in 1968, and by 1971 macular degeneration caused her to lose all her central vision, leaving her, eventually, with only some peripheral sight.

Georgia O'Keeffe by Philippe Halsman, 1967

Yet even during these waning years O'Keeffe remained true to the spirit of her art through the life she led. For her, there had been fulfillment in an existence that almost totally revolved around her art. It was, after all, through painting that O'Keeffe filtered all experience.

View from Georgia's studio at the Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico by Basil Langton, 1971

On March 6, 1986 O'Keeffe died in St. Vincent's Hospital in Santa Fe, having almost reached her goal of living to 100; she was 98 years old. At her request, there was no funeral or memorial service, though her ashes were scattered from the top of the Pedernal over the landscape she had loved for more than half a century.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe celebrates its 15th anniversary this year.

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
217 Johnson Street
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501

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Happy Birthday Ansel Adams!

Church in Taos Pueblo, New Mexico by Ansel Easton Adams
(February 20 1902 - April 22, 1984)

Ansel Easton Adams, born on this day 110 years ago, was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park. One of his most famous photographs was "Moon and Half Dome" taken in Yosemite National Park, California.

Moon and Half Dome by Ansel Easton Adams

With Fred Archer, Adams developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs and the work of those to whom he taught the system. Adams primarily used large-format cameras despite their size, weight, setup time, and film cost, because their high resolution helped ensure sharpness in his images.

Adams founded the Group f/64 along with fellow photographers Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, which in turn created the Museum of Modern Art's department of photography. Adams's photographs are reproduced on calendars, posters, and in books, making his photographs widely distributed.

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Brigitte Carnochan's Floating World

 Send a Message by Brigitte Carnochan

Allusions to poems by Japanese women of the 7th-20th Centuries

"While rummaging through a used book store in Princeton, New Jersey, I discovered a volume of haiku and tanka translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi in 1977. The poems were by Japanese women from the 7th through the 20th centuries and represent all the major styles during this period - from the Classical to Contemporary schools. I was immediately drawn to the poems, and as I read them - so allusive and rich in imagery - I knew that I wanted to make their photographic equivalents." - Brigitte Carnochan

The Floating World refers to the conception of a world as evanescent, impermanent, of fleeting beauty and divorced from the responsibilities of the mundane, everyday world. For the poets in this volume (whose names are calligraphed in each image) that world centered on love - longing for love and the beloved, mourning lost love, pondering its mystery. The beauty of the natural world - its flowers, landscape, the moon, and the changing seasons - serves as the primary metaphor.

 

Images of this series are printed on uncoated handmade Japanese Kozo or mulberry paper using archival Epson Ultrachrome pigment inks. The Japanese calligraphy was executed by Richard Man.

Immigrating to America from Germany with her family at the age of six, Brigitte fell in love with ballet, hoping to pursue a career as a professional dancer. In the real world, she first became a high school teacher then a university English teacher, and later worked in university development. Photography is her third career. She began working seriously in the medium twelve year ago, using friends from her dance classes as models. She has remained a dancer: “Dance provides me with models as well as therapy.”

She is also an avid gardener, which supplies her with many of her floral subjects. However, it is her hand coloring on traditional silver gelatin prints that she makes herself, that has captured the worldwide respect for her images. “Even though most people see the world in color, they do not see everything in the same exact colors. From an optical point of view, the colors we see depend on where we stand in relation to the object, where the sun is on the horizon, what color the walls are, or the tint of our glasses (or contact lenses), and so on. From a psychological point of view - everything depends on whether we are worried, elated, anxious, in love, lonely, distracted, or fully alert. For this reason, I often hand color my work, because the process allows me to interpret the essence of my subject according to my own imagination.”

Brigitte lives in Portola Valley, California, a town located in the coastal hills south of San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited in over two dozen individual and group shows across the country. Teaching workshops and giving university lectures has been a regular part of her life for the past decade. She is the recipient of numerous awards and is currently a board member of the Santa Fe Center for Photography.

Brigitte Carnochan's works can be viewed until July 11, 2011, at The Iris Gallery of Fine Art Photography in Boston, MA.

Brigitte Carnochan "Three Portfolios"  

May 31 till July 11, 2011

The Iris Gallery of Fine Art Photography

129 Newburry St.

Boston, MA