In Black-and-White from the Balcony Garden 2021
Artist’s Journal
“White Spring” on Fine Art America
From Black Box to Fieldwork — Still Cookin’!
It’s a lucite paperweight with the artwork etched in from the back.
I, James S. Oppenheim AKA J.S. Oppenheim, and Communicating Arts have enjoyed it as emblem.
Properly lit, it’s striking.
Among the early dreams for Communicating Arts in 2006 when the move was made to Hagerstown, Maryland, a county seat in the western panhandle — and a terrific location in the mid-Atlantic collection of states — was that of shooting small objects: jewelry, inkwells, candy dishes, alabaster statues, glass eggs, and so on. That offering continues.
As good as our cell phones have gotten with recording, much in commercial and fine art continues to recommend studio-level control.
As energies decline, and, alas, they do, some things remain more inviting as work than others. Communicating Arts has had the privilege of spending some quality time with a very special cat, “Graycie”.
Such efforts involve connection, empathy, and patience.
I’ve no idea how the catfood people wrangle or direct their talent, but method is very simple: set up, sit still somewhere, and pray.
🙂
Communicating Arts has also enjoyed getting band work.
Still, there may be nothing quite like an intriguing face.
I may have developed too much consistency in style. Perhaps Communicating Arts should be shooting more exterior portraits and directing and producing more atmosphere and look.
And then there’s the more cared for snapshot: “Fieldwork”, I call it.
I know I would tired of being stuck indoors with objects hour after day after week on end — but gardens and fields (add the drive, add a glass of wine, and when the light is no more, work in a restaurant for reward), they are the best places, rain or shine.
All things countryside continue to attract my attention.
It’s generally good just looking and sometimes looking twice.
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Surreybrooke, Middletown, Maryland, June 22, 2015
Project: North Tract
Communicating Arts has a large file of gorgeous landscape and nature photographs made on what was once a combat training site for the U.S. Army. Back when I was shooting, the “North Tract”, also known as the Patuxent Research Refuge, was treated as a Wildlife Management Area with a managed Federal hunting program that had grandfathered in that use of the land when the tanks were sent south to Arlington, Texas. I partook.
And navigated with compass and map.
And when permitted, took a camera along.
The digital files made from 35mm were scanned at 2400-dpi and the jpegs diminished for the dial-up web of the day.
Times have changed.
The resident scanning device, which has been at my station for a while, scans at 5,000-dpi and broadband Internet has grown up. Editions of editing tools like Lightroom and Photoshop have also advanced. As it is still winter and I remain active as a photographer, the day has come to dig out those old files and prepare them for online display and print sales via Fine Art America (for the time being).
From about 2006-2007, the advent of blogging and broadband and numerous online communities and services, all old enough to remember the darkroom’s “soup” have been through a chaotic journey along myriad contours of the digital frontier. We’ve made friends on Facebook and Google+, have launched inventory across social media and services like Flickr, have worked on e-retailing with such as Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, and Fine Art America — and I would venture to suggest we have learned that it is possible online to simply run out of energy and time doing nothing more than communicating.
On clear weather days and come the end of winter, there will be more fieldwork from Communicating Arts — landscapes and nature, travel — but the journey through this period, 2007-2015 has been broad, chaotic, energetic across quite a few areas of interest and skill. Having grown wide, it may be time to narrow down some or recalibrate relations between a “trifecta” in the arts: “writer, musician, and photographer” — all true — may be finally ready to settle down.
Note to Self as Caretaker of a Vast Web Estate
Not all channels, links, and paths will take my fans, followers, and general creative writing, music, and photography readers to the Fine Art America page (psst: where prints may be purchased): however, I am asking the familiar tough questions here, chief among which is, “Do I wish to remain in business throughout 2015?”
Hell yes!
That was easy.
For one thing, I’ve been “all in” for years with Communicating Arts and the related e-mail address anchoring a fair part of my life. In essence, I made myself — symbolically, cybernetically, virtually — an institution and much beside: “Miniversity”; “Bar, Grill, and Home Theater” (oh yeah); and, of course, “The Library” as well as the “mansion inside a cottage inside an apartment on the eastern edge of western Maryland.”
Our lives with computers may not have begun so accidentally: IBM and Bill Gates knew where they were going before Apple showed them a whole other way of living. However, 2006-7 broadband x blogability x that War on Terror x Facebook (Google+ not so much for me, thanks anyway) brought quite a kit to the affording Everyman’s desktop: social networking, shopping, pizza delivery. Yay. Now I am wondering which of my links, early (like Oppenheim Arts & Letters), redundant (but more real, less all business, like J. S. Oppenheim — All Together) or successful but, alas, not remunerative (yet) like BackChannels (it’s approaching 12,000 view annually in an arcane area — political psychology) should I wish to cut and all content lose?
“You wanna keep that old blog alive, you better pay up!”
Five easy blogs (I still think Communicating Arts: The Journal looks cool): would just one do?
Setting old history aside, I’m inclined to more deeply mine my digital and film assets in photography and better work the “Fine Art America” outlet. That mission’s either already sitting on the drives or in old negative and 35mm slide files.
However, I have lost the will to post one image, essentially, in a half-a-dozen different online spaces!
Forgive a not-so-old but older man for tiring at last and in need of a few projects focused and routinized.
Composing and playing music . . . would have been much, much easier than all of this sprawl across multiple artistic and intellectual dimensions and its concordance counted in blogs and Facebook circles.
To manage the transition from an HTML web and a higher-priced e-mail host, I dealt myself a reseller’s account on a popular platform, so I have got this primary page-and-mail space, and I and it are going to be around this year.
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Petunia and Nemesia, Balcony Garden, Hunter Hill, May 11, 2014
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When has the photographer stepped up from snapshot to photograph?
I don’t have the definitive answer but believe that when the tripod has been set up, the business of recording has been slowed down and one may then make decisions about composition and depth-of-field somewhat different than one might if inclined to merely point and shoot with greater convenience.
As my several lives distract one another, especially my life online tangled up in global conflict, politics, and political psychology, I have found each grows its own little show. The match here between artist, garden, Gitzo, and Nikon (D200, 16-85mm VR mounted with a circular polarizing filter on top) would seem about as convenient as photography may get: for everything else, including other gardens, one has to arrange a session or commit to travel, which is fine if the call comes to perform.
If the call doesn’t come, well, than one may do as budget and leisure allow or encourage.
With so many bins for leisure, photography, which I feel wants for visual adventure through travel, has over the past year or two taken some knocks. It has had politics, online networking, music, books, and “journaling” with a fountain pen — definitely “unplugged” in the diary-keeping department — for competition.
So be it.
I’ve been given business cause to mobilize lamps, stands, tripods, and cameras this coming weekend, so here it is good to go over everything, from wires to light meters to lenses.
It feels good.
And the garden this spring seems yet a fine place for relaxing.
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CA Continues to Photograph Fine Art
Communicating Arts continues photographing art by other artists.
“Gillian Lisette-Coubert”, whose name is a nom de brosse, has been a friend of Bill Roberts for some time, and I had promised as part of the work undertaken for him — his inventory in paintings mounts into the hundreds — that I would shoot a few works by Gillian as well.
While I find “technical everything” somewhat unpleasant — where is my art!? — I’ve really come to enjoy both artists’ delight in color, depth, and texture as well as admire their ability to draw. Both have demonstrated ability to draw to photo-realism standards were either so inclined.
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Communicating Arts to Photograph Studio Catalog of American Abstract Surrealist William A. Roberts
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William A. Roberts has an art story that starts in childhood with talent and a devastating fever, suffers in the shadows of a triple murder, and begins anew after a long hiatus. Aided, abetted, perhaps, by the local coffee shop scene in Hagerstown, Maryland — just us “old guys” gabbing over coffee and newspapers at the counter — Communicating Arts has agreed to photograph the artist’s collected and still resident works.
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