massive columns. like being in some old church.
immaculate. only visible from above.
and finally, it’s good to look up sometimes.
Archive for the 'source images' Category
here are a couple of images to prolong the summer feel
and then there’s an october chill in hopper’s paintings of transit and waiting, possibly to if not from destinations such as the new england ponds (the stone bridge through the train window)
finally, it’s the waiting places that seem to be worn from the anticipation in these photographs by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg of bus stops in Armenia (see also the Hejaz railway photographs on Schulz-Dornburg’s website)
There are no more clues on the back. another favorite: “I liked the way you said goodbye” written below a lake scene that’s mostly obscured by foreground branches.
for the moment, i’ve gone over the edge into a crazy obsession with postcards. the views that are both generic and obscure combined with a shorthand intimacy make me wonder what sort of narrative could be invented. the brief text was necessary because the so-called postcard era (1900-1906) precluded any text save for address on the back. A new body of work may be forthcoming..
“Let’s spend our vacation in…”
I will be in a group show in the spring of 2010. my piece will be a maquette of a power plant type of structure set into a rocky cliff bordering a lake, waterfall and bridge. The piece will be about anticipation.
here are a two new drawings made while traveling by bus. these will be backgrounds in new constructions for photographs.
Here are more Hitchcock film stills, this time from The Lady Vanishes, 1938. It starts off with a wintery view of four peaks on the brink of an avalanche (notice that moon between the two distant mountain tops), a pan across rocky chasms and foothills, with an unbroken downward swoop past what could be a miniature set but for the barely perceptible movement of a bell in the conductor’s hand. This unbroken shot disolves at the window of an inn (several buildings to the right of the train depot), taking us into the still reverie of a fire-warmed interior. The impression lasts only a moment as Miss Froy mischievioulsy opens the door, letting in a gust of a storm. With a jolt, the band splutters to life, a cockoo clock clucks, and here enters Margaret Lockwood. The rest of the movie is comprised of spectacular and tensly close shots on a train and impecably composed landscapes, like this one of the train speeding across a viaduct.
I’m not sure what the Hudson Tunnels line became, but Chambers St. has the tall square tiled columns too. There is a goldmine in source images at cardcow. For example, this form of transportation:
Film stills of a Hoboken waterfront rooftop in a film by Elia Kazan and downtown Manhattan side streets in a noir film by Anthony Mann. A billboard structure from the Myrtle station platform and an architectural bridge in Cambridge. I often pause a movie to photograph a scene with my phone’s camera in the same way that while reading I’ll stop to write down a line. These acts are as mnemonic devices, after a fashion.
The multiple planes of graffiti along the elevated train in Bushwick and the scrolled metalwork and antennae adorning Kazan’s rooftops share a graceful coexistence amongst the stepped box forms of the buildings. Likewise the subtle and varied surfaces against the harsh angles in skyline and monumental form, rending consequence from gravity. As if from these buildings even I could take flight. These magical places will be rebuilt either as photograph or maquette.
here are a few spectacular stills from Hitchcock’s Saboteur. they occur at points in the film where the hero’s innocence and resolve are tested by man and nature and are right out of the pages of the German romantics 125 years prior (see Philip James de Loutherbourg, An Avalanche in the Alps, 1803, also Casper David Friedrich, Sunset 1830) and the American rocky mountain school (Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, 1866).
have a look at what the neo-romantics are up to now: Christopher Orr, The Farthest Shore, 2008, and here.
on the sublime, here is a list (!) by Hildebrand Jacob in How the Mind is Raised by the Sublime, 1730′s, of such things and places: oceans, either in calm or storm, the setting sun, precipices, caverns and Swiss mountains, compiled during a time when excursions were made to such places for the purpose of inspiration, awe, reverence. in other words to be made to feel small, frail, temporary…
A new maquette/installation featuring a waterfall, precipice and bridge is in planning stage. I plan to have it ready for exhibition in the Fall.
“The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room”–Pascal, Pensees, 136.
(list and Pascal quote from The Art of Travel)
