Sunflowers 2024.

Retired schoolteacher who grows Sunflowers. I like it.  The Night Bloomers are currently cycling, but my Sunflowers, who I have been thinking about growing for ten years are actually standing 5 ft tall.

June of 2020, first week of the month. I shot sunflowers in the Guatemalans yard.  They grew them several years in a row and I'd admired them greatly, walking the dogs every morning.  Really got serious. I had a ladder and various tools to reflect light, throw shade, split exposures for half a negative, then the other half.  Every morning at 7:00AM.  In their front yard working the row of spectacular Sunflowers.

Guatemaleans moved on.  I had thought about growing Lindsey Lane Sunflowers for a decade or two.  This year I ordered a mountain of dirt, got it installed, beds torn out, re-dirted.  And planted.  Early March.

90 days from planting to flowers.  Here we are.  First blooms showing their faces.

Just....light.

Night Bloomers really to go.

Going.

Night iPhone 15.

Sunflower faces.

I'm in business.  Though I may just be looking.  73 individual plants up and going.

Working the Yard at Lindsey Lane.

 When I really WAS a child, I got a job photographing hotels around the country.  At one point I was in Connecticut, at a hotel that was the third one on its site.  The first one had dumped garbage in a creek on the back of the property.  The creek and the dirt was full of crockery and bits and pieces of restaurant ware.  I had my normal kit, including rubber boots for wandering off to brushy viewpoints.  I spent an hour in the creek pulling up bits.  Really taken with broken cups and bowls.

Over the years they have dwindled for various reasons, down to just the favorites.  I'm de-cluttering further around the house.  Some things close to them went.  They were on my mind.

Yesterday I saw a fresh mushroom while I was in the yard early with a cup of coffee.  I brought in the cap and stood it up in one of the half-cups.  Shot one 8X10 piece of film.

This morning another mushroom cap had emerged in nearly the same spot.  If the cards get dealt that exactly, I never refuse to play a hand.  I brought it in for a second, better/different/newer composition.  It is better.  

Now I have them all lined up in the studio.  Expecting a third mushroom.

Day One

Second look.

Maybe, with good printing.

So.  Tomorrow.  Maybe different cup.  Different mushroom.  Different cut.  Different me.

One more Pictura note.

Curator Mia Dalglish and the Opossum from the Blackfork Bestiary.

 

Ten Texas Tornadoes wrapping Feb 22 at Longview Museum of Fine Art.

 

The Blackfork Bestiary @ Pictura Gallery in Bloomington, Illinois.

The Blackfork Bestiary, with some skillful curating by Mia Dalglish and Lisa Woodward, made the trip to the FAR Center for Contemporary Art in Bloomington, Indiana.  It's already been there and back again.  Very nice show.  The selection and sequencing caught me by surprise.  I didn't change a thing of their work.  Curators picked prints from the unpublished and matched old favorites in ways I had never imagined.  I felt like I was getting smarter just looking at their layout.  The majority of art folks can leave me a bit uninspired.  Was nice to meet geniuses.

Children's workshop the morning after opening.

                                                         A six-buck donut across the street.

Nice crowd opening night.

Demonstrating how you unwrap bobcats.  Or something.

Lisa Woodward, lighting guru.

With smart people.

Curators Mia Dalglish and Lisa Woodward.