On Camas and Krueger

Several weeks ago, Betty and I led some intrepid friends on a photo safari to the Camas Prairie area of Camas County, northeast of Boise. Typical late May weather brought wind and fog and rain and snow instead of sunny skies with puffy clouds sailing east to west. It was Memorial Day weekend so we anticipated a wild stampede of Idaho locals since it was the peak of the camas bloom.

Camas

Camas is a member of the lily family and erupts in the spring from bulbs that like flat terrain that collects a lot of winter snow and moisture. Before the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans cultivated camas to some degree, using sophisticated management practices to protect and even increase the production of this (at one time) important food source.

In wet, good years, camas explodes on the prairies and from a distance looks like lakes and ponds when it peaks out in the bloom.

To defeat the crowds, we left early. That’s how Betty and I defeat the crowds. Leave early.

The weather may have been a problem if we had let it, but we’ve found over the years that if you get out there, even in inclement weather, you can find something to fall hopelessly hopeful over.

We led our Sonoma County, California, friends, Shelley Macdonald and Rod Helvey, and our Boise friend, Linda Kahn on the trip. We made a new friend, too: The Idaho landscape painter, Geoff Krueger, who also came along.

The wild weather chased the crowds away and we enjoyed the camas and the quiet along with the spitting rain, the fog, the wind as we stopped and shot photos, photos, photos.

Camas Prairie and Soldier Mountains

On the prairie, the camas indeed looked like lakes and ponds, the sky was a wild palette of grays and blues and whites. Everywhere the honks of geese, the skrakes of cranes, the quacks of ducks, the whistles in the snipe wings, the plaintive cries of willets and curlews and phalaropes.

We shot prairie grass, camas, sheep shipping pens, reflections in the water that ran everywhere. The snowcapped Soldier Mountains loomed off to the north, the latest dusting of snow like icing on a cake, and the snow’s form matched the shape of the sky as it glowered and mists of rain fell like paint flowing over a canvas.

The farm architecture, barns, schools, churches, homes, tractors stood out on the stark horizons against the day’s gray gloom like something out of Grant Wood or a rural Edward Hopper.

We shot camas and camas and did I say camas? Cattle and golden eagles and aspen and pine trees.

Geoff Krueger was along to see the country and take photos as inspiration for his paintings. He took a ton of photos. Betty and I found ourselves watching him. We sneaked looks as he framed his pictures. We could see the composition in the LED screen as he zoomed in and out, moved the camera about, got out of our CRV, walked around, got back in.

I loved the emotion that roared up in me when I’d see what I thought was the perfect composition in his LED, but no, he’d adjust it and yes, it would be so much better.

Corral in the Bennet Hills

After lunch in Fairfield at the Iron Mountain Inn, we went back to the prairie and shot more camas. Then we wended our way back to Boise through the Bennett Hills and the edges of Bennett Mountain. At the top, near Cat Creek Summit, we hit thick fog that dripped off the logs of an ancient corral and spits of snow that pinged us as we shot photos of aspen thickets.

I don’t know how many photos Geoff Krueger snapped; it was at least two cameras full. Betty and I are excited to see when some of what we saw him composing in his LED screen shows up in a gallery somewhere. Salt Lake, Seattle or LA? Boise? Or perhaps his Daily Dose of Painting on his website.

You can find out more about Geoff Krueger’s work here.

On Man, Nature and Beauty

The weekend before last, Betty and I ate a sumptuous Sunday supper with our daughter and son-in-law, Sarah and Baruch Ellsworth, at The Corson Building in the Georgetown area of Seattle, Washington. After dining we headed back north to our lodging and noticed Mount Rainier, whose bottom was obscured by clouds that made the mountain look like it was suspended in a pink space, the pink coming from the setting sun illuminating the snow covered sides. The majesty of the instant reminded me of all those moments when nature sneaks up and surprises us with the magic of an unforeseen display.

Driving north we looked to the west and the peaks of the Olympic Peninsula jutted up like busted-off teeth, the recent snow only slightly more radiant than the mountain range’s rocky parts, all of it defined by the splayed light of the dying sun. A rose tint cast on the western sides of glassy skyscrapers. The thin clouds overhead captured their own pink tints, so that the night hung with a pregnant beauty created by a mix of season, sunset, snow, rock, and the steel and glass of tall buildings.

Since returning to our home in Boise, the mental image of all those pinks captured in both natural and manmade surfaces has set me to thinking on the nature of beauty in landscape.

I am a creature of the American West, having lived in desert, city, coastal and mountain environs, and have learned to appreciate what the land has to offer. Coastal rips of white and blue waves engulfing craggy rocks populated by black cormorants; fierce-toothed dust storms looming over spiny Sonoran desert mountain ranges; Rocky Mountain meadows and creek banks pocked with purples and reds and yellows of lupine and Indian paintbrush and cinquefoil; acres of high-basin barbwire and sagebrush dusted with an early morning snow; the lacy fingers of ice on the edge of a winter river. And not just nature, but also sunlight jigging in the windows of tall buildings, or the reflection of the spring-green hills in the glass of skyscrapers, the exquisite arc of a bridge over a foamy river…mixtures of man and nature’s creations that generate moments compelling one to mumble, “Aha.”

I suppose that those human/natural creations can be either serendipitous moments of sun and glass and cloud, or something envisioned by an architect or urban planner designing a building, a park, a bridge. Either way, there seems to be beauty in the meeting of land and man.

Granted, sometimes the meeting doesn’t result in something particularly grand, but in something heinous and ugly. I often recall moments of driving down boulevards of towns in the American West when the view of mountains, meadow or canyons has been blocked by cheap buildings, too many catty billboards, street lights, telephone lines, street signs all jumbled, with no thought given to how they may meet the human eye.

When we decide, as humans, to do it ugly, we do it well. Yet it’s not so simple as saying man only creates—through his bad behavior, his greed, his lack of foresight—things that are monstrosities to the eye and our sense of aesthetics. That would be too easy. Sometimes, I think, through his most catastrophic acts, man, in conjunction with nature, does create beauty.

Before I continue, don’t get me wrong, because I despise warfare on the most elemental levels. But as I sat trapped in the Siege of Khe Sanh, 1968, one of the things that rattled me the most was the stark and searing beauty created by war.
Bombarded trees shattered, their stripped limbs backlit by the early morning sun, or caught in stark white-barked contrast to the bomb and artillery shell-hole-pocked red mud landscape and the long spine of rugged jungle-tiered mountains in the distance. Those same tree limbs observed in juxtaposition to the hulls of blasted coffee-plantation houses, the roofs bashed in, the walls half gone, their surviving bricks delicately fingered out into the space left behind when incoming artillery killed all the life inside. Or the jumble of sea bags and ammo boxes with their weird geometrical scatter against the dull green of a shredded Marine Corps tent and the red dirt of the surrounding terrain. The abstract expression existing in the jumble of spent artillery casings and scraps of torn jungle dungarees, a collage it seemed; and a Guernica-like Picasso-esque helmet without a head, a boot close by, no foot inside. Beauty…our horrible beauty.

Words inspire pictures inspire words

Idaho photographer and educator Mike Shipman guest blogs in this week’s regular Friday edition.

When I was in high school, I wanted to be a writer; which was after I had passed up opportunities for lead guitarist in a rock band, pro football player, archaeologist, and architect. Words were escape, and still are; a transportation to another time and place, a transformation from one being to another, one lifestyle to another. And, words were (and are) therapy; sometimes, or often, expressing triumphs and failures through made-up situations and characters. When I write, and when I read, the words inspire pictures in my head (as I’m sure they do for you as well), whether Abbey or Leopold, Nabokov or Asimov, Feynman or Gould, poem or newspaper. The images are recalled part (or all) from past experience, knowledge and familiarity of the subject, or completely made up from my current knowledge, my emotional state at the time, or the flights of fancy driven by my imagination.

For example, this poem written by Bret Harte (1839-1902), published in 1880, evokes a variety of images:

The Two Ships

As I stand by the cross on the lone mountain’s crest,
Looking over the ultimate sea,
In the gloom of the mountain a ship lies at rest,
And one sails away from the lea:
One spreads its white wings on a far-reaching track,
With pennant and sheet flowing free;
One hides in the shadow with sails laid aback,
The ship that is waiting for me!

But lo! in the distance the clouds break away,
The Gate’s glowing portals I see;
And I hear from the outgoing ship in the bay
The song of the sailors in glee.
So I think of the luminous footprints that bore
The comfort o’er dark Galilee,
And wait for the signal to go to the shore,
To the ship that is waiting for me.

These words bring to mind a photograph I made on the Oregon coast:

In turn, pictures inspire words. When I look at pictures – paintings, drawings, photographs, moving images, or shadows – I can describe what I see, feel, how I react, in words. I become aware of various associations and “resonances” awakened by the image that can also inspire new and unrelated words and stories completely out of context to the picture’s original content, intent, subject, or subject matter. It’s important for visual artists, like photographers, to be able to describe their creations in words. It helps the viewer understand what the image is about, how it came about, what it means to the artist, and helps the artist understand for himself what the work is about. And when you write words inspired by pictures those words, coming full circle, need to inspire pictures in the mind of your reader.

It might be easier for some people to find or create pictures from words than to craft words from pictures, and vice versa. But, with practice, illustrating what you read and writing about what you see becomes easier and, being interconnected, help improve both.

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.” John Ruskin (1819 – 1900)

Mike Shipman is a freelance commercial, editorial and fine art photographer and educator in Nampa, Idaho, and owner/photographer of Blue Planet Photography (www.blueplanetphoto.com). He is an Idaho Commission on the Arts Teaching Artist and leads workshops and classes in the western U.S. and around the world. His work is found in private and corporate collections across the U.S. and exhibited in the Boise, Idaho area. He believes everyone is creative.