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This is a series of photos of the water and atmosphere of Chesapeake Bay captured at dusk on December 27, 2016, at 4:42 PM. Click each photo for a full-screen view.
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Posts Tagged ‘Chesapeake Bay’
Dusk over Chesapeake Bay – Six Photos
Friday, January 6th, 2017WONDER at the Renwick Gallery
Monday, September 5th, 2016The 2015 reopening of the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC, was celebrated with an exhibition featuring the work of nine contemporary artists. Five women and four men created site-specific installations that occupied and transformed the museum’s refurbished gallery spaces. Over a period of 8 months, visitors found themselves immersed in wonders indeed. Official photographs of the event can seen at the online gallery, here. Below are photos of three of the nine rooms that I took during my visit in April, 2016. Descriptions of the artists’ works quoted below are borrowed from the Renwick Gallery’s wall texts, found here.
Maya Lin, Folding the Chesapeake (installation, 2015)
“Growing up in Ohio in the 1960s, Lin watched her father participate in the fledgling studio glass movement then gathering steam in nearby Toledo. The marbles used in this installation are the same industrial fiberglass product Henry Huan Lin and other glass-blowing pioneers experimented with then, which were soon abandoned by artists as technical knowledge matured. Folding the Chesapeake marks their first use by Maya Lin and a new chapter in her decades-long investigation of natural wonders. By shaping rivers, fields, canyons, and mountains within the museum, Lin shifts our attention to their outdoor counterparts, sharpening our focus on the need for their conservation.”
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Gabriel Dawe, Plexus A1 (installation, 2015)
“Dawe’s architecturally scaled weavings are often mistaken for fleeting rays of light. It is an appropriate trick of the eye, as the artist was inspired to use thread in this fashion by memories of the skies above Mexico City and East Texas, his childhood and current homes, respectively. The material and vivid colors also recall the embroideries everywhere in production during Dawe’s upbringing.”
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Tara Donovan, Untitled , 2014, © Tara Donovan, courtesy of Pace Gallery
“Employing mundane materials such as toothpicks, straws, Styrofoam cups, scotch tape, and index cards, Donovan gathers up the things we think we know, transforming the familiar into the unrecognizable through overwhelming accumulation. The resulting enigmatic landscapes force us to wonder just what it is we are looking at and how to respond. The mystery, and the potential for any material in her hands to capture it, prompts us to pay better attention to our surroundings, permitting the everyday to catch us up again.”
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Did the Tusken Raiders have pet dogs?
Monday, February 16th, 2015.
While looking through some old photos this morning, one snapshot from June, 2008, of my golden retriever Jesse, made me pause and reminisce. The location was the Calvert Cliffs formation on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay. Jesse had climbed up into the debris of a fallen section of the cliff, and I snapped him when he worked his way around to this position:
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It looks like Jesse wanted to reenact a scene from Star Wars — the scene on the planet Tatooine when the Tusken Raiders (less formally referred to as Sand People) make their scary appearance:
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Jesse found a similar protective position, and he even managed to emit a low-voltage eerie glow from his otherwise dark eyes, just like the yellow-eyed Jawas below.
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But as for creating just as threatening a look as those two native species of Tatooine? Bah! Earth-bound Jesse totally fails it.
Edgar Hewitt Nye, “The Great Bluff, Chesapeake Beach, Maryland”
Monday, October 25th, 2010Earlier in the month I bought at auction a painting by the Washington, D.C. painter Edgar Hewitt Nye (1879-1943):
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A plein air sketch (oil on canvas, 18″ x 22″, signed, lr, “E. Nye”, ca. 1920s), this bright landscape was untitled in the auction catalog and otherwise lacked information about its location. It looked familiar, though. The mystery was solved when I found a few souvenir postcards dating back to the early 1900’s when Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, was a popular tourist destination for day-tripping Washingtonians (who arrived there by railway) and Baltimoreans (who traveled by excursion ship). Edgar Nye was one such traveler. What he decided to capture on canvas was not the crowds attracted to the roller coaster and other boardwalk diversions, but an untouched stretch of Calvert Cliffs just to the south of the town. The cliffs are a fossil-rich, Miocene era formation stretching for 30 miles along the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Calvert County, Maryland.
Here, then, on a summer day, just a short remove from the noise of the resort, we can imagine Nye walking down to the water’s edge. He finds himself in a place where the air is laden with moisture, where baby waves break softly on the beach. It is here the artist plants his easel in the sand and spends a few hours playing with colors.
He puts to shame the dull penny postcards.
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