DryStoneGarden

Lime Hills by Naoya Hatakeyama

In a comment on my last post, James mentioned Edward Burtynsky’s quarry photos which are really striking and highly recommended for anyone who hasn’t seen them. Coincidentally, SF MOMA currently has an exhibit of photos by a Japanese photographer, Naoya Hatakeyama, who works in the same vein as Burtynsky, photographing large scale human impacts on the landscape, including quarries. His Lime Hills (Quarry Series) has images where the quarries are horrible scars, but also ones where they seem quite sculptural and aesthetic.

Naoya Hatakeyama, Lime Hills (Quarry Series)

Naoya Hatakeyama, A Bird/Blast

Along with the photos, at the museum there is also a very cool video (titled Twenty-Four Blasts) of quarry blasting. If you sit up close to the screen, the explosions fill your vision. The video doesn’t seem to be online, but SF MOMA posted a slideshow of stills from the best sequence.

Naoya Hatakeyama, Still from Twenty-Four Blasts

I went to the exhibit to see the quarry series, but probably the most powerful images — especially in light of the superstorm blasting the east coast right now — are of his hometown in Japan, Rikuzentakata, which was destroyed by last year’s tsunami. It was impressive to see such carefully composed photos, knowing that this was his hometown and that his mother died in the event. He talks about it in a video at Wired.

— Places Journal has an article written by him, talking about his work, including an interesting take on how horizontal and vertical elements are either lying down or standing up. —

Naoya Hatakeyama

There was also a slideshow of his photos of the town before the tsunami, and though the exhibitors chose not to present the before and after photos as literal side by side comparisons, there was an eerie similarity to some of the compositions. I tried drawing thumbnails at the speed of the slideshow — twenty seconds per image — and then later colored them at about the same pace. It’s rather off-topic for this blog, but completely current with all of the images of flooding on the east coast, so I included them below the fold. (more…)

This is probably the last of my summer sketchbook, this time from a little further south and a couple weeks later, in the Bear Valley area. This year I’ve been to Tuolumne, Loon Lake, and now Bear Valley, pretty good for one summer. I’m hoping to make it up the mountains one more time before the snows, but we’ll see.

These first three watercolors are from Spicer Reservoir. It has more of a bathtub ring than Gerle and Loon lake, but it’s nice. I wasn’t aware of any hiking trails around the reservoir, so I walked along the shoreline, boulder hopping and swimming from the rocky peninsulas.

I had a minor plein air adventure at the reservoir. While I was sitting at a picnic table, working on this one of the dam, a couple came and settled themselves down in the sand about thirty feet away, a little behind me. I didn’t pay much attention to them, and I’m thinking they didn’t notice me either, because a little while later I realized they were sharing the kind of intimate moment which is not usually shared in front of other people. With my watercolor stuff spread all over the table and the watercolor wet and half-completed, I ended up just putting headphones in my ears and ignoring them. I’m still a little taken aback.

I also went to Calaveras Big Trees State Park along the same highway, a little bit lower in elevation. Great park, amazing trees. I think the sequoia groves there are better than the ones in Yosemite. I did a couple of watercolors at a swimming hole on the Stanislaus River running through the park. I set up in a more visible place, on a big rock in the river, and no one there showed me anything I didn’t want to see.

Gerle Creek Reservoir

These are from a camping trip to Gerle Creek reservoir in the El Dorado National Forest above Placerville a few weeks ago. I think it’s funny how the first one blends with the background color of the blog. I seem to like this olive-y chartreuse color, as it shows up in my blog, drawings, plantings, clothing, and probably other places I’m not aware of.

The Eastern Part of Loon Lake

While camping at Gerle Creek, I hiked at nearby Loon Lake. Both lakes are reservoirs, which I’m usually skeptical of, but they’re both quite pretty, with rocky islands to swim to and jump from. The largest island (below) looks like a great spot for a kayak or canoe camping trip.

The Central Part

The Western End

I got back to watercolor for a couple of sketches at Stern Grove during the recent Ozomatli show. We were up on the slope behind some trees, so they might not be the most accurate I’ve ever done. I recently went to a talk by Edward Westbrook who owns Quarryhouse, the company that did the stonework. I added a few details from his talk to the end of the Stern Grove post I did a couple of years ago.

Tuolumne Meadows

We’ve entered the summer months when I try to get up into the mountains as often as possible. I take the point and shoot camera with me some of the time, but these days I take a sketchbook at least as often.

Yosemite Creek Trail

These drawings are from a couple of weeks ago when I was up at Tuolumne Meadows. I was going to do watercolor to continue with my efforts from this spring, but in the end I just did pen and ink and then colored them at home.

Kitty Dome

Puppy Dome Swimming Hole

Cathedral Peak

I mentioned that lately I’ve been taking an evening class to learn watercolor. I’m interested in using it for location sketching and possibly for the drawings we do for clients, but so far almost everything I’ve done has been indoors after the sun goes down, working off black and white photos. Not exactly location sketching, but it has been pretty helpful. The photos give a good sense of value and because there is no color, I feel free to experiment. The colors tend to turn out differently than I plan, but because it’s from black and white no one can tell.

After some casting about and experimenting, I’ve ended up working from a series of photos by Wilfred Thesiger. A little random, but I had to choose something to paint and I’ve loved his photos for years. He was the last of the old-school desert explorers and one of the all-time great travelers. Arabian Sands about his explorations of the Empty Quarter of Saudia Arabia is one of the great books of travel literature; The Marsh Arabs, about his years living in the marshes of Iraq is also great; and the compilation, The Last Nomad, is one of my favorite books. His writing describes the landscapes and cultures with an amazing clarity, and the photos are powerfully evocative and certainly don’t need any coloring efforts by me. There’s a selection of photos here, but really his work is best appreciated in an old-fashioned, dead-tree book with text and images together. Both his photos and the writing have an unsurpassed stark black and white expressiveness.

I confess I don’t know a whole lot about the places I was drawing. The town above is named Shibam, in Yemen. Below is a place called Liwa Oasis, showing that ‘oasis’ is very much a relative term.

The others are scenes from the Empty Quarter, the largest sand desert in the world.

We’ll see how much watercolor I do going forward. I did feel like it got its hooks into me, so these probably, hopefully, won’t be my last.