This detail of the seven foot wide piece is NOT my original photograph. This is the embroidery. Every minute feature of the flowers, grass, and background trees is created with thread. One of the revelations was that the surface has relief. In many places, the needleworkers used five or six layers of thread to capture the complex color and texture of the twilight scene.

The organizers, Jennifer Ha Than and Lawrence Gooberman, would like to place the work in an appropriate museum or corporate collection. Wherever it finds a home, I think it should be displayed with interpretive material on the embroidery tradition in Vietnam, how it was lost during thirty years of successive wars, and how Jennifer who came to the United States among the Boat People in the 70′s returned home to find the scattered artisans who still knew the technique and reorganized them to pursue this project.

My wife and I staff the booth together and enjoy the weekend more than any other event we do during the year. We appreciate the good Southwestern cuisine, good conversation with an interesting set of collectors, good visits with friends we have made over the last five years, and dramatic storm skies over the city every afternoon. What’s more, the fair is well run and the organizers are a pleasure to deal with.

Art Santa Fe is an annual juried event that brings together the work of contemporary artists in all mediums from galleries in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the United States. For ASF details go to their site: http://www.artsantafe.com/

The booth this year was equally divided between my large-format landscape imagery and the newer camera-based, non-objective work that I have been developing over the last three years when not traveling to wild places.

The most recent image was shot in October 2010 on a trip through the Four Corners area as I was returning to San Diego from Santa Fe. The title is O’KEEFFE COUNTRY, NEW MEXICO. As with all my landscape work, it was shot on 4″ x 5″ transparency film.

The sandstone cliffs in this picture are just outside Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu. This is the red rock country where Georgia O’Keeffe painted for the last thirty-four years of her life. I was drawn to this composition by the geometry of the cliff wall with its smooth, vertical folds and horizontal bands over the triangular shapes of the eroded rock below. The exposure was made in the soft, warm light just before sunrise.

FIRST SNOW IN THE SAN JUANS was shot back in 1998, early on in my pursuit of the light on the land with a large-format camera. The location was the north slope of Red Mountain Pass between Silverton and Ouray, Colorado. When I saw this scene I got excited about the rare coming together of pure new snow and aspen color. It was the first place I dared stop after a pre-dawn, white knuckle drive down unplowed switchbacks with no guard rails. I tried printing this image as a conventional enlarger print on Cibachrome paper but I was not able to get rid of a reddish color cast in the snow. I had a similar problem with a purple cast using Lightjet technology for the next ten years. Finally, with the ink/paper combination I am currently using, I am satisfied with the purity of the snow while striking a warm color balance for the overall scene.

The third newly printed image was shot even earlier, in 1997, just east of San Diego overlooking the Anza-Borrego Desert. I saw this vast boulder-strewn landscape as a study in texture and repeated shapes. The cloud shadows which overlay the scene break the landscape into separate zones and create a great sense of depth. Originally, this image printed well on Cibachrome paper, but in the intervening years I was not satisfied with the way it rendered using Lightjet technology. Now it works again and I’m putting it back in the portfolio of active images.

The gallery also features tapestry, sculpture in bronze, wood, and ceramics, as well as painting in oil and encaustic. A visit to the Chmar Gallery puts you within one or two blocks of the Georgia O’Keefe Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the New Mexico History Museum, the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum, and the Palace of the Governors. Not to mention a host of fine restaurants.

The lot backs up to a narrow wildland preserve, an extension of one of our longtime favorite state parks. The existing building was the small, ramshackle cottage you see in the “before” picture here. It was reduced to the foundation and two walls and ended up buried inside the new structure.

We worked with an architect for over a year. In the process I became addicted to SketchUp, Google’s 3-D modeling software. It is a powerful, intuitive program that allows you to easily create and modify a design, visualizing the final product in surprisingly accurate detail at every step. So vivid was the mental picture that for the first few mornings in the new bedroom we had the surreal feeling that we were waking up inside the familiar SketchUp model.

Living up to the common perception, the house-building experience is inherently nerve wracking. The decisions that come at you in a near-daily torrent have such enduring consequences that you are never quite sure you have done the right thing. Nevertheless, it is a tremendously engaging process, and, in the end, quite rewarding. Aesthetically, it is not unlike the making of pictures writ large. Balance, color, composition, light, texture, the interaction of competing elements, all of these figure into the design. In a sense, architecture is, or at least can be, functional art on a grand scale. But, unlike most artistic enterprises, it is constrained at every turn by the discipline of real world limitations and requirements.

One of the most satisfying elements of the new house is my studio. Since we were starting from scratch, I had a chance to put together a space that incorporated lessons learned over the last thirteen years in two previous houses—garages, actually. Mundane tasks like cutting mats and putting frames together now seem a lot more acceptable. And for the first time I have enough (well, nearly enough) flat surfaces to hold work in various stages of completion. Although in a pinch I still resort to the dining table and the top of the piano.

Hi Robert,

First off I’d like to start by thanking you. I’m sure this will come as complete surprise to you, but you don’t know just how instrumental you have been in my recovery from cancer, AML (Leukemia) to be specific. I was diagnosed with Leukemia in June of last year and was treated at the UCSD cancer center. Once I was able to leave my hospital room after 5 months of treatments, I came across Aspens After a Morning Rain in the Moores Cancer Center where I still get weekly treatments. I still sit in front of that picture which I believe you donated and put myself in a better place.

My Uncle has a log cabin out in Montana right in the Madison Valley which is surrounded by Aspens so it literally allowed me to escape to one of my most loved places on this planet. Anyone who has been through what I have been through knows just how important and instrumental things like that can be in one’s recovery, so again, I want to personally thank you for your role in my recovery. Not to say I couldn’t have done it without you, but you definitely helped.

Name Witheld

We saw pieces that ran the gamut from Old Masters (most notably 16th Century Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder), through Impressionist, to Modern, to Contemporary at prices that ranged from $300 to three million. The organizers reported 40,000 visitors over the four day weekend. Check the LAAS website for information on next year’s fair.

The booth was divided evenly between my established landscape imagery and the newer camera-based, non-objective work that I have been developing over the last two years when not traveling to wild places.

Over four days the show brought in 35,000 visitors despite the severe weather that tied up the LA freeways for the most of the week. The crowd was as diverse as the art and unusually attentive. We did well in terms of sales and got back in touch with a number of people we hadn’t seen for years.

During the exhibit, I enjoyed spending time in the gallery during a series of public events starting with the crowded, upbeat opening reception. I ended up talking with a number of friends I hadn’t seen for years. The catering was excellent.

On Thursday, October 15th I gave a lecture with projected images to a knowledgeable and enthusiastic group. The questions were among the most perceptive I’ve encountered.

During the exhibit G2 took orders for prints of the photographs in the show as well an additional forty images that were available for review in a portfolio book in the gallery.

Rare Places began its run, in an earlier version, at the San Diego Natural History Museum. In its current form, it has been hosted by venues at Harvard, Cleveland, the Napa Valley of Northern California, and Cody, Wyoming.

Here’s a link to visitor quotes from the gallery guest book in San Diego.