“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”*
The artist Todd Watts does.
Watts’ Blanchard Weather Report is a portfolio of forty sublime color images seemingly about the mist, fog, rain, snow and even sun in the bucolic, Acadian Maine setting where the artist lives, having relocated there from New York seventeen years ago.
These are meditations on the landscape, Zen koans if you will, “paradoxical anecdotes or riddles, used to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment”.
Exactly.
The Weather Report began as a series of e-mails in 2014 that Watts sent out irregularly to his friends and followers, The Unseen Eye being both. Initially one responds to the loveliness Mr. Watts searches out and seems to find. But there is always something off, an imbalance. This may not be Natural perfection but rather the Artist’s version of it. Shape, color, and composition are more important than real information or location.
These are mediations of the landscape.
The colors are unusual, more monochromatic than Nature. Many things start out looking like silver. The accenting salmons, yellows, roses, pale blues and grays are sometimes heightened by a blush of a secondary hue.
The titles are dates: day. month, year.
In 7-17-2016 a slim mirrored landscape on the horizon is basically black and white, except for the faintest brushes of pink and green. The Eye’s favorite is 2-21-2014, an all seeing cosmic eye with washes of tangerine fire swirling around a black vortex.
The thickets, forests, leaves and ponds are oddly orderly. A vertical matrix of tree branches look like re-orchestrated overhead wiring in 5-27-2015.
The artist has been at work adding, subtracting and rearranging. This is especially clear in the odd suspension in the leaves in 5-01-2016 and the unlikely opposition between the birds and nests in 04-04-2016. There is something delicious about the vast bluish white emptiness of the lake in 12-13-2014.
At first glance, the Eye thought of Eliot Porter, particularly the late Polaroids of the American Southwest, further underlined by Watts’ tidy 13 X 13 inch, square format. There is a Porter-like sunset with an electric charge of chromium orange in 12-21-2014.
Ernst Haas is closer to Watts historically, with both men’s color experimentation, shallow depth of field, selective focus and blurring. Haas famously observed that “transforming an object from what it is to what you want it to be” applies here.
The tree in the hazy ghost of a landscape in 6-26-2015 has a completely constructed, fictional shadow/reflection. It is a continuous silhouette, but the bottom is a broadly gestured reference and response to the top. Images like this behave like the hazy sylvan glens of Pictorialists like Gertrude Käsebier, Alfred Steiglitz, and George Seeley, and, compositionally, Oscar Gustave Rejlander; the latter because, like Watts, he does wholesale manipulations of scenes.
Crazy and dreamy.
The show was organized by independent curator and local legend in Maine, Bruce Brown, and by the time you read this, the exhibition will have come and gone.
It rained briefly and karmically at the opening.
W.M. Hunt
W.M. Hunt writes as The Unseen Eye. He is an occasional contributor and an original supporter of The Eye of Photography.
*The opening quote sounds like but should not be attributed to American writer Mark Twain, but rather to an editor and writer named Charles Dudley Warner although Twain did say, specifically about New England, that “if you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes”.
Todd Watts’ Blanchard Weather Report
PhoPa Gallery, Maine Media Workshops + College
132 Washington Avenue
Portland, ME 04101
USA
