Door County Captured In Cliché-Free Photography By Rolf Olson

Photography with artistic aspirations in Door County can be a hazardous undertaking. Pretty much every attractive scene has been photographed a dozen times, and that’s just this year.

So it was a pleasure to see that Rolf Olson’s show at Door Peninsula Winery in Carlsville had no lighthouses or images of Cave Point.

One path he has taken to beautiful images is to focus on close-ups, often with a great eye for delicate textures. “Waiting the Wind” is a closeup of an open milkweed pod whose threads are ready to catch the next breeze.

Direction of Spring is a very funny image that arose from great observation. It is of grasses and perhaps trees bending into a pond and a branch and shadow in the middle that forms a nearly perfect triangle pointing to the right, like the start button on an Internet or YouTube screen. Really good.

Other photographs show how a carefully edited approach can avoid the cliché which so often lies in wait for photographers. “Reefing the Royal” shows a crew member up on a spar taking in a sail, but shoots him in shadows against a darkening sky.  Most photo manuals would say that is the wrong direction to shoot or at least requires flash, but the image is deeply mysterious. In another, The American Century, Olson has shot a laker, again from the shadowed side with the name clear but not highlighted, and the sun hitting the bow and lighting it up in a reddish profile that runs down the front of the ship.

Does he edit out the obvious before shooting, or does he cut it when selecting images to print? I have no idea, but the show is full of interesting subtle images like shadows cast onto the textured side of a barn by nearby trees, shades of soft red and light black. Another barn side is the setting for a long hand-made wooden ladder hanging and casting a shadow, the whole effect could be black and white except for the tell-tale strip of green grass along the bottom. In “Winter Harvest” an old tiller sits on white snow against a gray sky. Old farm machinery in empty fields is hardly a new subject for photographers or painters; this, however, captures the cold gray winter’s day well enough to invoke shivers.

“Evening Harvest” is is full of reds and blacks in a stunning abstraction that even after extension examination left me clueless about its location. Olson’s show is a great example of capturing Door County with fresh vision.

Pamela Murphy in "Studio Life" Book by Sarah Trigg

Pamela Murphy, the Sister Bay artist, is included in a new book from Princeton Architectural Press on American artists and their studios.

The book, entitled Studio Life -- Rituals, Collection, Tools and Observations on the Artistic Process, includes pages on 100 of the 200 artists across the country that Trigg talked to. The project, which she figured would take one year, consumed three.

Sarah Trigg, an artist who grew up in Appleton and has been living and working in Brooklyn, recounts how an artist friend looked around her studio as she prepared to move out of her DUMBO neighborhood and remarked that a chunk of foam sitting on a window sill was like a mascot.

Trigg decided to visit studios across the country to talk with artists and photograph their stuff -- mascots, collected objects, makeshift tools, rituals, residue and habitats. Portraits and images of their actual art is available elsewhere, she noted.

She knew some of the artists before she started and then relied a lot on references from  artists to avoid relying too much on galleries and other sources tied to the market, she writes. She found the studio visits illuminating.

“...in a few cases I was familiar with the work but understood it much more clearly after the visit.” She notes that artists rarely have other artists visiting their studios; .more often they see collectors, gallery owners or curators.

In 2011, partway through her residency at threewalls in Chicago, she writes, she visited her father who has a home in Sturgeon Bay, and asked him about artists in Door County. The next day, on his suggestion, she ended up in Murphy’s studio.

“In tandem with her studio practice, she lives off the food grid by maintaining a vegetable garden, beehives, and a ten-acre animal farm with goats, chickens, rabbits and geese,” Trigg writes.

Trigg’s photographs show Buddhist prayer flags that Murphy brought back from her studies in India and Pakistan, drawers of the vintage photographs that inspire many of her large, often layered paintings, and her miniatures. She is represented in Door County at Fine Line Designs in Ephraim. The book also includes pictures of Murphy’s goats and geese and explains her decision to live outside a big city.

“I wouldn’t be able to get any work done and live the kind of life I want to live. I started thinking more seriously about it and thought, Pam, you got the land, the space, the  buildings, and you’ve got the lifestyle that allows you to work here. So I can have animals, but it’s a second full-time job.”

Trigg also interviewed Craig Blietz who recently had a one-man show at the Miller Art Museum, and he is on her site, http://www.thegoldminerproject.com/wordpress/artists/, but without any biographical information or photos yet. In her book Trigg said she made an effort to include a fair representation of women and different ethnicities.