Space and the end of Easter…

by John on May 12, 2013

I just helped a friend board the Blue Star ferry ‘Delos’, en route to Pireaus.  It is Sunday evening, May 12, on Paros and the Easter season has ended…finally!  The smell of lamb fat has rinsed from my hands, the out-of-towners are returning to their homes and the island is quieting down.  I was shocked by the crowds already on board the ‘Delos’ as well as those embarking.  Hordes.  Masses.  All with rolling luggage dragging behind them, seemingly forgotten in some small dusty corner of their minds.  Passive traveling at its worst.  Why is it that we forget about the items directly behind us and we tend to lead with memories from so long ago ahead as if they are current events? Hmmm…

On the other hand, the Aegean Center students enjoyed a lovely day out at sea with Captain Tassos and his crew for our spring “Boat Trip”, a somewhat circular route around Andiparos, stopping at Despotiko, then Taverna Zombos on the southern side of Andiparos for a mid-afternoon feast: gigantes, kolokithokeftedes, bean salad, xoriatiko salate, calamari, oktopodi salate, saganaki tiri…a true food event.  I needed some space, some time alone so I stayed back at the school and worked on my current painting, a view from a balcony overlooking a small courtyard adjacent to the school.  I had three hours of quiet for this and I managed to work very well, very hard and productively in that short span. Then I hopped in my trusty FIAT Panda, drove to the Andiparos ferry, went over, swam  at both Livadia and Agios Giorgos beaches, took some pictures (film and digital) and met up with the rest of the school for the above-mentioned meal.  Orea!

Here is an image from today.  A view of Andiparos–Leica M8, Voigtlander 28mm, ISO 160, F/16, 1/125, hyperfocus…clouds and wires

Some walls, a lamp,  sea, sky, clouds.  Enjoy!

JDCM

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Greek Easter, Paros, 2013…

by John on May 3, 2013

There was a time before my time, before the time of my sisters, my parents, my friends…

For some reason this phrase popped in to my head today.  For the past few days I have been helping a friend and mentor and her husband move house.  It has been an emotional and difficult time for them and I have been honored and humbled to help sort through decades of their life here on Paros, and earlier.  We have been separating the wheat from the chaff–a difficult process.

Much of what they wished to save has been in the form of photographs, or more precisely, photographic archives.  That is the only way to think of it.  Negatives of all sizes, black and white, color, contact sheets, prints.  Their time here has been documented and preserved in hard-copy.  There was little  digital imagery.  As I worked I felt something meaningful, truly palpable, while holding a negative up to the light, perusing a contact sheet or carrying an artist’s portfolio bursting with prints.  Compared to the lightweight, back-lit digital medium that takes up little space and weighs all but nothing, these items, this archive, made sense to me.  Maybe those of us in the digital age have become so accustomed to the ease with which we view, and then delete, images, or page through them via myriad viewing software programs that we are beginning to forget the importance of this process.

My point is that memory, that elusive, ever-changing spirit we carry in our soul, is something that should have weight.  It should take up space in our homes.  We should, every once in a while, take a photo album or box of negatives off the shelf, dust them off and hold them up to the light of day.  As we gaze, we smile.  We remember friends long gone or vistas experienced in a way that we cannot when looking at an LED screen or something of that nature.  We smile, or we cry.  We tell a friend, “Look…here…this is when we…” and then hand them the fragile transparency or piece of paper.  We pass on wheatthat experience.

We are all repositories of the past.  This brings me back to the idea that there was once a time before my time, before the time of those who came before me.  I have books as proof, books I can hold.  I have folders full of negatives, unprinted.  I am accumulating weight in the form of artists portfolios stuffed with prints.   I have held them up to the light of day.  I say, “Look…here…This is when I…

Happy Easter!

JDCM

 

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Still lives, Vermeer and constant change…

by John on April 17, 2013

I post this dispatch not from Paros, but from the ancient and industrial Port of Pireaus.  I am sitting at the Terminal CoffeeFoodDrinks Cafe, adjacent to the Port Authority Police Station.  The Center has been on spring break for the past few days and I have taken the opportunity to head to Athens for some r&r and some shopping for the darkroom, and myself.

I have been photographing some of the still lives used by Jun-Pierre Shiozawa, the painting instructor at the Aegean Center.  These two are a small selection he has used for his negative space drawing class.  I saw them and found them fascinating and worth documenting.  They are colorful and difficult.  I will post some more later this week.

The third image (jug and pear) is the projection of a still life from inside the camera obscura, built by Jane Pack and the advanced painting students.  I was, at one point, involved in that project at a fundamental level.  I had to withdraw due to other responsibilities.  I was thrilled (and cramped!) to be able to crawl inside the camera with my Canon 5D MkII and my 35mm lens to make a capture.  It has not been altered in Photoshop other than a small amount of cropping.  The colors are as they were to my eyes.  pen-jar-sldove-slAfter looking at the image I am convinced that Jane and her crew have cracked the code to Vermeer’s camera work.  Amazing!

 

On a sadder note…the longtime cafe overlooking the bay of Paroikia where I have posted so many of these blog entries has closed.  Pebbles Jazz Cafe has been a fixture on the Paros waterfront for over 15 years.  Aegean Center students have sat and watched the sun set after a long day in their studios; musicians have played their instruments on warm summer nights for happy, sun-drenched crowds; Dimitri has smilingly brought coffees, wine and other beverages to those in need of the view, some peace and a vantage above street level and photographers have sat safely inside, blogging about the changes they feel while they sipped their filter coffees and listened to the winter wind shake the walls.   As one friend on Paros has said, hopefully,” someone else will open it up but the sunset remains the same.”  I have a t-shirt I bought there a couple of years ago.  I imagine it is a collectors item now.  RIP…

Vermeer-1

So I head back to the island in about an hour.  Three more days until the second “half” of the term   and there will be much stressing out and running around by the students.  Me too, probably, as I have not been able to get much work done with my own portrait project.  For me, I am hoping for a flurry of printing and then some work with a Greek translator for the posters, handouts and (cross your fingers!) maybe even a small book to go along with the show.  Right now I am looking at the end of August heading into September…Cross your fingers.  Cross all of your fingers!

 

JDCM

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March 31…

by John on March 31, 2013

In the West today is Easter.  It is also the end of Passover, I think.  In Greece we are still in the midst of Orthodox Christian Lent.  Our Easter Sunday is not until May 5, over a month away.  Spring has sprung.  Here at the Aegean Center we have two more weeks before our spring break and then, when we resume, only a month before the end of term.  Time certainly flies when you are having fun, and I must admit, I am having fun.  Don’t get me wrong, I am full-bore with work, but as a wise man said a few weeks ago, “Fun isn’t fun…work is fun!”  I have to agree.  Nothing makes me happier than to be either a) working with students in the darkroom b) printing my own work in the darkroom c) painting in my studio d) photographing people in my neighborhood with my 4×5 e)…Where do I stop?  Yes, much work, many challenges, much fun and more to come.

As I write this at Pebbles Jazz Cafe, looking out on the silver-grey sea, I am reminded that Confucius wrote “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.”  This is not to say that I have a job or that such tasks are not without difficulties and trials, but that the rewards from walking through the fires of such experiences are greater than their immediately perceived headaches.  We are galvanized by venturing into the shaky unknown and facing what we fear.  Hence, the definition of courage: embarking on a course of action despite our fears.

I have been reading Homer’s The Odyssey, in a class taught by Jeffrey Carson, here at the Center.  I have read it before with him and a couple of times on my own.  I prefer reading it with a group and meeting once a week to discuss the reading.  I enjoy the interaction.  It is a simple story, really: the tale of a man trying to get home to his wife and family.  Nothing more really.  On the way he confronts dangers and strife, some of his own making.  Some emanates from external forces which he cannot control, i.e. the gods.  That’s it.  Not much else goes on.  The rest is more for flashy adventurous color thus keeping the guests interested while they eat.  Homer’s script still works.

A few of the other students have read it before in either high school or college.  They have taken classes in which Homer’s work has been dissected and rearranged to fit with post-modernist theory or some other deconstructive dialectic.  In the academic study of history this would be called ‘revisionist history’,  a plague of inaccuracy to historiographers.  I wonder what Homer would have thought of these interpretations?  It reminds me of this scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall…

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for differing opinions.  They make us interesting humans.  They are what attracts me to people.  For me, simplicity is complex enough.  This applies to my photography as well.  I have been printing some 35mm images I have made while on our Friday Hikes.  Upon review I find they are all the same, and I mean that in a positive sense.  They are textures, light and shadow–wide expanses of Zones.  Subject matter isn’t as important as it used to be.

I was going to quote some Emerson in today’s blog, but the entry is too verbose.  In keeping with Homer, I will borrow something from The Odyssey instead.  Shortly after the beginning of Book VII, Odysseus is walking through the seaport of the Phaiakians accompanied by Pallas Athene.   She encourages his bravery by saying, “The bold man proves the better for every action in the end, even though he be a stranger coming from elsewhere.”   Re-interpret that.  I dare you…

JDCM

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News from Paros…a journey of small bites…

by John on March 10, 2013

Lupens blooming along the path to the monastery of Agios Kyriaki

Lupens blooming along the path to the monastery of Agios Kyriaki

The first week of the spring 2013 session at the Aegean Center has all but ended.  As I sit in Pebble’s Jazz Cafe, overlooking the bay of Paroikia, the sun begins a slow descent towards the faint outline of Sifnos to my west.  Since my return at the end of January the sunset has moved slowly north along the ridge of that island, the daylight has increased and the temperature has become warmer.  There have been welcome harbingers of a lovely spring: warm, breezy with high clouds and only sprinklings of rain, barely enough to dampen my laundry hung out to dry, birds singing in the bright morning…

My work for the next few months has been laid out for me, a buffet of grand proportions.  My own large-format portrait work, which I have written about before, takes priority if I wish to have the printing finished by the end of May and the work at the framers by June.  This is the beginning-of-the-end of a long-term project, the seeds of which I planted during  the winter of 2011/2012.  I have two or three more sittings to arrange and then I can begin crossing tasks off the list.

I am also teaching in the darkroom, guiding the bright and eager minds of our small cadre along the meditative paths of silver photography.  I have been impressed in this first week by their enthusiasm, previous experience and general attitude towards the idea of ‘slow photography’.  I can only hope that they, too, feel as if I am an able mentor for their journey.  There are two or three returning students working on the darkroom, which benefits everyone.

The third element is my return to oil painting.  I loved it the first time last spring and this time around seems no different.  Just today I was working on a piece and I was struck by how much I love oils: their malleability and fluidity, the ability to push them around on a properly prepared canvas…

The fourth menu item this session is a fascinating journey into the world of Johannes Vermeer, more precisely his use of the camera obscura in his work.  There are three of us working with Jane Pack and in the next few weeks we will construct a full-scale replica of the master painter’s  camera, discover how he applied it and use it ourselves to draw, and then paint, some still lives.

When I realized a few days ago the scope of the labors set before me, my heart and mind quaked.  I quickly spoke to an advisor which helped.  I know that I can accomplish all of these things, but like a plate of food at the above mentioned buffet, this kind of smorgasbord can seem impossible to consume.  Like any dinner, it starts with the first bite.   Before I know it will be the end of May and I will be ordering coffee and dessert.

JDCM

 

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Spring unfolds at the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts…

by John on March 4, 2013

The spring session has begun here on Paros at the Aegean Center.  The students have mostly all arrived, riding in on the winds and waves.  It poured rain all day yesterday and the streets turned into small rivers.  By last night the clouds had rolled away and today is sunny and bright.  I have many thoughts running through my head, so many raindrops, really, and in many cases just as discarnate.  Add them up, however,  and they are a flood, a river of their own.  I found it comforting to stop thinking.  I loaded up some Plus-X, grabbed my tripod and headed down the now undimmed streets of Paroikia.  Action, not thinking, always improves my day.

I will be painting again this session.  I will also apply the finishing touches on a large format photography project that I began last year, a series of portraits of people I know here on Paros.  They are students, ex-pats, local Parians…My Greek barber, Nikos, for instance, as well as the English owner of a local cafe.  A motley crew to be sure.  I will finish the principle photography and printing in the next three months, bring all the final proofs to Athens and have them matted and framed.  I hope to accomplish this before the end of June when I head back to America for a month.  When I return in August I will hang the show and open the exhibit.  It will be the culmination of my work here at the Center, my Masters Thesis in Photography, if you will.  I have no idea where the show will be.  I’ll stick my neck out again.  So far that hasn’t been the most successful venture here on Paros.  I have lost my head more times than not (certainly gaining wisdom) but what choice do I have?  ”Action and more action…”, as they say…What follows my exhibition is anyone’s guess.  I suddenly feel lost at sea with the prospect of September.

I will be assisting again in the darkroom with the students, as I did last fall, so my energies will be focused on their work more than my own.   Like the weather moving in circles, alternating rain, sun wind and calm, the Aegean Center is part of the cycle of  change.  I cannot do much except sit back and trust the process, let the story write itself and accept the results.  Once again, to assume anything would be foolish, self-serving and arrogant.  As of this morning I am excited to work with five or six (maybe seven) students, some who have never handled silver emulsion and some with more knowledge.  We shall see how the session evolves.  I remember having many preconceived notions of photography when I arrived here on Paros three years ago.  They were soon dashed in favor of a new and vibrant dynamic.  As a lotus blossom, spring unfolds…

JDCM

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Some images from quarantine…

by John on February 16, 2013

Balcony-view-1Balcony view-2

 

 

Today is sunny and bright.  I have opened my windows to air out the sick bay.  I am feeling much better and have only two more days of antibiotics.  Here are some images from the past week…

Balcony view-3Balcony view-4

 

 

 

JDCM

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News from the sick bay…

by John on February 14, 2013

The rains have come in to stay, or so it seems.  It is winter in the Aegean and it is damp and cold, the kind of damp that seeps into one’s bones and begs for all to just stay in bed.  There have been a couple of days of sunshine, but other than that it has rained, drizzled, poured down and showered.

Last Sunday evening I was sitting in my apartment reading when suddenly it felt as if all the energy had drained from my body and mind.  I was ill, I knew it.  I managed to stay awake for another hour or so but then I was in bed and out like a light.  The next morning I woke up as sick as one could be. My lungs were full of crud, as were my sinuses, swollen glands, etc…I took the advice of friends and went to the doctor who gave me a prescription for antibiotics, expectorant, throat gargle and high strength ibuprofen.  As the days have progressed I have improved but I feel I am not out of the woods yet.  Three more days of pills and I should be, well…right as rain.  Over the days friends have brought me food.  Chicken soup from one, a fish stew from another.  Today I was given some onions and carrots so I could make lentil soup.  These are some of the finest people I have ever known.

On another note, my quarantine has given me the chance to photograph my immediate surroundings from the viewpoint of the small balconies on either side of my flat and out my kitchen window.  They have an abstract quality that perhaps I would like to paint also; geometric shapes of varying hues of tan to white, blue expanses broken my myriad antennae.  I’ll post some images next week.

So it is movies, books, soups, plenty of fluids and lots of bed rest for me.  I have been reading Joseph Campbell and Edward Weston; James Bond and Harry Potter–comfort foods for the mind, body and soul.  The weather is supposed to improve by Monday and then John and I can get back to work building benches and so forth.

JDCM

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Guidance, delineation and communication…

by John on February 8, 2013

It began with lamp posts in 2005.  There was a quayside in Ermioni, a boat on dry dock and an ornate iron lamp post looking out over the still water at sunset.  Then there were more lamp posts in Bosnia, arcing around the gentle curve of a mountain road, leading to where…?

Now there are stone walls climbing and moving across the landscape of the Kyklades.  They have been accompanied by electrical poles, maybe telephone lines, I am not sure…

I have been photographing them for the past few years, mixed in with all the rest.  Driving back from an area here on Paros the other day I was struck by how these all are indications of the hand of man in an otherwise wild landscape.  I have a choice.  I can bemoan the state of affairs regarding these structures or embrace them as something more, strong vertical and horizontal lines, shadows of human needs.  I have thought of lamp posts as bringers of light in the darkness, guidance along dim roads.  The stone walls define our boundaries, of both self and property, for they are often too insignificant to keep any creature at bay.  The poles signify communication over distances.  Guidance, delineation and communication.  I would post some examples, but I feel that everyone has an idea of what I am speaking of without the illustrations.

It is raining here.  Last night the deluge dropped a hail of roaring ice in Paroikia.  It woke me at 4AM.  It also deposited all the red, sandy dust that has been blowing from the south, out of the deserts of North Africa.  This is the scirocco.  The air was clear this morning and as I drove south to visit some friends for coffee I marveled at the archipelago surrounding me: Sifnos, Serifos, Sikonos, Ios, Kimolos, Syros, Tinos, Andiparos…rugged walls ran through green hills, telephone lines stretched thinly into the blue distance and, even though the sun was bright, my heart was gladdened to see the occasional unlit streetlight along my path.  If I came this way on a dark and stormy night I would not become lost in the tempest.

JDCMBlue-Door-(behind-the-curtain)

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Parian viewpoint…

by John on January 29, 2013

I returned to Greece last Friday and after a long and uneventful journey I found myself at the “Eleftherios Venizelos” airport, the gateway to Greece.  It was quiet at 16:40 hours on a Saturday.  Aside from my Aegean Air flight, there was only one other craft that seemed to be in use, a KLM A320 parked at the terminal.  This speaks to both the slower winter season and the decision for other airline companies to curtail their schedules into this country, a nation hit hard by both the global economic crisis and a media-fed-fear of governmental instability.  While the economics are true, the other claim holds no water.  This is a land of change and transition and so many people are preferring to sit on the sidelines and watch the drama unfold.

It was raining and the skies were lead-grey.  I hailed a taxi and as we headed towards the city I was struck by how green everything had become since my departure in December.  The traditional music coming out of the small radio  made my heart melt and run like the rain.  As we sped along the motorway, the driver handed me an orange.  ”From my garden–this morning”, he said.

Change is a difficult stage of life for any organism, whether it is a country or an individual.  The best course of action is to change the dynamic.  When an old path isn’t working, one does not stay on the same road and travel with more verve.  One takes a turn at the next crossing, thus expanding the journey.  If one has a philosophy that is dear, it is important to keep this philosophy as a compass and at the same time open up prospects for new and exciting ways to implement the fundamentals.  12 years ago I grew weary of the career in which I had been laboring.  Instead of finding a new niche within that  limited community I shifted gears and turned off the main road and connected with a new highway.  Now I am in Greece, practicing my skills and craft in photography.  The remnants of the old ways are gone, leaving only memories and an ability to create this marvelous dish.   I can only offer advice based on my own experiences.  When something isn’t working, get out of the way and take a new road.  After all, change is the only true constant in the Universe.  Photography is the same.  There are so many variables within the craft, especially with the added tools of the digital medium.  It would be foolish and arrogant to discount them in an attempt to hold onto some mythological idea.

Speaking of that, I had a change of heart recently regarding the noted photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.  When he said, “In order to give meaning to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what he frames. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry”  I have to applaud.   I agree wholeheartedly but it was disappointing to watch the documentary, ‘The Impassioned Eye’ .  This film revealed that he cared little for, and avoided at all costs, the developing of his film and printing of his images, a part of the journey that I feel is so important to the photographic life.  I believe that he was little more than a guy with a camera in the right place at the right time.  A small bubble has burst, but a bubble nonetheless.  Now I am a little more free than I was.  Change is good and necessary.  Change is essential.

A view of Agios Phokas, Paros.

A view of Agios Phokas, Paros.

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