Tree and Till

At the beginning of the year, I started photographing farm fields as part of a series called Landmarks. This photo was taken in Interlaken, NY, on a late-March morning before the sun permeated the dense fog.

"Choose With Love" Trailer

It’s here! This is an exciting moment for me. Choose With Love is a project that I’ve been working on in the midst of other studio projects for the last decade. Even on the days when I didn’t feel like making much of anything, there was always something small I could do toward this project.

Nature has been a real comfort and joy for me particularly during this time of social isolation. It’s been an incredibly difficult time to be a parent with so many new challenges to navigate with each new wave. I think I need it to be over, even if only in my mind, so I’m declaring it.

Choose With Love has been an incredibly fun project for me. It took me around 10 years to develop my illustrative style for this book using collections I found in nature. I imagine I’ll continue to develop this style over time. I didn’t know exactly what it was I was making in the beginning. I just loved working on it, and I kept coming back to it.

The trailer premiered on March 29th, and there was an amazing outpouring of love and support from family and friends. I feel truly blessed. A huge thank you goes out to Tim Gera for his incredible animation skills, and thank you to my husband, Lou, for composing the music with such care and consideration.

Here’s the link on YouTube, and please share if you feel called to do so: https://youtu.be/uJ2RSaAt_xw

Thanks for watching!

Honeymoon Island

The wild beauty of Honeymoon Island in Dunedin, Florida, is what I imagine the state looked like before all the traffic, crowds of people, and concrete plazas. The photo above was taken while walking the Pelican Cove Trail. The photo below was taken on the Osprey Trail.

A blurb on the park map gives this brief history of how the island got its name: “The island received its name in 1939 when New York developer Clinton Washburn purchased the island and, together with LIFE magazine, held a contest for newly married couples. The winners of the contest would stay in thatched bungalows in sunny Florida for a two-week “honeymoon,” giving the island its name.”

Honeymoon

Landmarks

I've been working on something new. It's unclear what it is yet, or if this photo below will even be a part of it. It's an exciting and slightly terrifying moment in any project. It's a time of open curiosity and exploration, and it's one of my favorite moments in any new project. What makes it scary is that it could turn out to be nothing, and I have to remind myself that that's okay too because sometimes it's the project after the one you're working on that turns out to be more meaningful.

Chainsaw Art Owl

I normally don’t get excited about chainsaw art, but this! Created by an unknown artisan. This owl is located on German Cross Road in Ithaca, NY.

Moss on Roof

My file organization is a lot like this image of Honey Locust leaves cluttering up our roof! I tried to find my photos of our Northern Catalpa tree, but no luck. The Catalpa was holding onto its leaves even as every other nearby tree has dropped theirs. I have the photos somewhere... Oh well, they will turn up. I’ve settled for this photo instead.

Moss thrives on our old shingled roof. The majority of the house has metal roofing; only this roof is single-covered. And it’s going to need replacing in the coming years. In the meantime, it’s been a great source of moss for projects or a holding ground for moss that is on the back burner and awaiting photography.

I use moss for the landscapes of my book project. This circular specimen above is one that I transplanted from a nearby forest. The roof is just outside my studio window, so it’s easy to grab when I need it!

Hi

Over the last year and a half, I’ve been compiling a digital wood-type alphabet to use in my children’s book. I had been struggling with how to add text to the page, and I knew that this aspect of the book would need to be resolved for the project to work.  

In 2019 I was teaching a Visual Language class at Wells College, prior to the pandemic hitting the United States, and it was there that I had access to the incredible type at the Wells Book Arts Center. It is probably the best collection of letterpress type in the state of New York.

This typeface pictured here Hamilton’s Post Condensed, and I choose it because it is the right balance of playful and dignified. I also love that it captures the character of wood and as well as some of the scuffs accumulated over the years. Some letters were missing from the collection, so I took creative liberty. For example, the ‘h’ was missing and had to be made from an ‘l’ and ‘n’. 

Working with text in this way has me thinking about the English language in ways I’ve never considered before. My son is simultaneously learning these letters and putting them together into words. 

In honesty, I’ve always had trouble with spelling and grammar. At times, I felt shame for not comprehending these things that seemed obvious to others. The visual language wasn’t strict with the rules, and that’s where I felt more at home. I began to think of myself as an artist nearly 20 years ago. Along the way, I forgot what it was like to write for joy. I particularly struggled with writing about my artwork in a way that felt authentic. Even this blog is a feat for me at times!

I stumbled into writing a children’s book because the visual language I was using in photography was so well-suited to this format. However, I have subsequently found it difficult to think of myself as an author. My book is less than 300 words after all. Now, I am also faced with the reality that in order for this book to enter the world, I have to own this new identity of an author, even if I’m not yet 100% comfortable with it.

But there you have, I’m an artist and an author now too. Hi.

9/11/01 Drawing

Twenty years ago, I made this drawing. It came out of an assignment given in my freshman year at Alfred University. As I recall, the instructions were to make a drawing from things found in nature. I remember going to the woods behind campus to find a spot along a path to draw the trees using decayed bark, mud and berries, and anything that would make a mark on the paper.

Looking back, I had no way to understand and process what had happened in the hours after the towers had fallen. That afternoon in the woods with my hands in the dirt was the most grounding thing I could do on that day of complete and utter helplessness. Thank you to the professor who assigned it, perhaps Nick Tobier, but I can’t be sure. Each year, when the anniversary of 9/11 comes around, I think about this drawing. I was only 18 and naive in many ways, though I didn’t know it (do we ever?), but when I look at this drawing, I see a glimpse of the person and artist I would later become.

That was a day of immense loss; the depths of which wouldn’t become clear for years to come.

9/11/01 Drawing, 2001, Decayed bark, mud and berries, 30” x 22”

Oak

I like to imagine all the people who have passed by this oak tree over time.

Oak tree at Lodi Point State Park

Oh, Ok

“Oh, Ok” is the way I feel every time some new piece of information about the evolving pandemic hits home. First, Oh: oh no, this is bad; oh, what does this mean now?; oh, how do we deal with this new thing? Second, Ok: ok, we can adapt; ok, we can make this work; ok, we’ll be okay, right?

I grew clover in the shape of these letters in seed trays this past spring and photographed them after about a week of growth.

Prospect Point and Terrapin Point

I’m diverging from my usual subject of trees for the month of February. Above is a view from Prospect Point, Niagra Falls. On this day at dusk, the mist from the falls was creating its own weather system in the form of a hovering cloud. Below, a solitary lamp post flickered on near Horseshoe Falls at Terrapin Point.

Above and Below

The Month of Falling Trees

September has been a month of falling trees.

This photo is the backyard of my husband’s childhood home in Olean, NY, and the opening, where a line of gigantic pines had stood just days before, now reveals a two-story house. During our visit, I saw many trees down across Olean. Around our tiny village of Trumansburg, 120 miles away, I had noticed the same phenomenon happening.

Early in the month of September, I was walking the dog in our neighborhood when an enormous Maple branch came crashing down behind a house as I passed. The sound was so incredibly loud that I was certain an entire tree had fallen. I knocked on the door of the house, and when no one answered, I peeked around to their backyard and spotted a tangled mass of limbs and leaves. I could see from this vantage point that it was not the entire tree but a single branch that had split away and come crashing down. The branch was enormous on the ground and seemed much bigger than its sister branches above. It had narrowly missed the house.

When it happened, I had been walking the dog, and I was completely distracted in my thoughts. I wasn’t really there walking the dog in that moment, but rather ruminating on the events of the past in an effort to make sense of something in my mind. The fallen branch woke me up in that moment. Where had I been? In that instance, it made me think of a book I had read by the Tibetan Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart. That book had been a gift for me at a not-so-distant time in my life when my sense of identity collapsed underneath me following the birth of my son.

I had been like the tree trying to hold onto branches that were ready to fall. Here I was doing it again. I was trying to hold up the branches, thinking I could somehow fix the feelings I didn’t like. What Chodron says is that we need to use these moments to wake up. If we repel the thoughts and feelings we don’t want to experience, we don’t leave space for life to move through us. We need to accept sorrow as readily as we except happiness because joy is the largest container that can hold it all, if we allow it to. We block our joy if we don’t accept the whole range of human emotions that need to move through us.

We can’t put the trees back once they’ve come down. We can wish for a different outcome, but that’s futile. What we should really be asking ourselves is, “What can we see now that the trees have fallen?”