Saturday, July 15, 2023

Martin Guderna  - 15 July 2023

 The Surrealist in the black leather jacket

That excellent on-line dictionary of the Spanish Language (Real Academia Española) defines obsession in Spanish as:

obsesión

Del lat. obsessio, -ōnis 'asedio'.

 1. f. Perturbación anímica producida por una idea fija.

 2. f. Idea fija o recurrente que condiciona una determinada actitud.

 

Obsession has been in my thoughts of late as I scan my plants every day and place them into two exterior hard drives knowing that I have over 3000 of them and that there is no practical reason for continuing except that I have fun doing it.

The idea of obsession first came to me (now in retrospect) when my mother had me take art lessons with an English artist named Robin Bond in Mexico City in 1955 when I was 13. Bond had been a camouflage expert in London during the war and in Mexico City he designed sets for Televisa, the Mexican TV company. He knew what colours to paint his sets and how they would look on b+w TV.

Every time I went for my classes there was a different woman there. When Bond painted he mixed his paints on the walls. The whole house was an array of painted walls and many ashtrays. Not much memory of the man is left on the internet but I can trust my own that indeed he did exist.

It took a while before I met another obsessed person. This was at the end of the 20^th century here in Vancouver. My friend, Argentine painter Juan Manuel Sánchez painted women every day of his life. He told me that he was in search of the essence of a woman. He would start with a blank canvas. He said as he stared at it, that his thoughts were about resolving that problem of that essential woman as Plato would have defined her. I mentioned once if some day he would put a dot in the middle of the canvas and quit as that would be the problem’s resolution. With a smile he said that was a possibility.

Juan Manuel Sánchez - a man obsessed

I believe I have met a third person that is obsessed. This is my friend the Czechoslovakian painter Martin Guderna.      

Guderna may be the only person I can call after 10 in the evening. In  that past with Sánchez I could have called him at midnight.

In our last last Wednesday meeting at the Sylvia with photographers, Guderna drew a portrait on a napkin. Before I took it to be framed I had him sign it.

 

Guderna paints until the early hours of the morning. In my last visit to his downtown studio and apartment he showed me works that reminded me of the photographic process called the halftone. It was this process that ushered in the printing of photographs in periodicals beginning in the mid-1870s. That the first photograph was one of the Steinway Building in a NY newspaper, attests that photography, the arts and writing worked together until the slow demise of journalism that is happening right now.

Guderna’s “halftones” are laborious. I told him that I was equally obsessed with my plant scans but that doing them was far easier than his works.  I did explain that since I have been scanning plants since 2001 I am good at it. He smiled and agreed.

                       

 

 

 

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Rosa 'Buttercup' & Rosa 'Betsy Sinclair' 19 July 2023

 

When Rosemary and I were married in Coyoacán, Mexico on February 8, 1968 the only way of finding music that we liked was in record stores. I had a friend (we are still friends and he lives in Guadalajara), Yorkshire-born Andrew Taylor. who had some secret way of finding what was hot in music. He is the one who introduced us to Joni Taylor and Leonard Cohen.

In fact sometime in late October 1962 at his home he put a 45rpm record and asked my opinion (I did not like it). It was the Beatles’ Love Me Do”/“PS I Love You,”

I have no idea how we found out about Donovan but Rosemary and I loved the man. Perhaps because at the time there was a radio station in English in Mexico City that connected on the hour with CBS Radio we might have found out about contemporary music there.

Reflecting back on this Donovan song I smile as Rosemary banned yellow (red and orange) from our Kerrisdale garden in the 80 and 90s until one day I told her about Rosa 'Mrs. Oakley Fisher'. Then I photographed Rebecca with it and from that moment one the rose became her favourite as was the English Rose R. 'Buttercup'. She was dead by the time that I bought Rosa 'Betsy Sinclair' from Robin Dening in 2022. She would have adored its colour. The date of this scan is today, 19 July 2023, but I will be placing it back to fill my gaping blog hole as I have had a terrible writer's blog block.

 Robin Dening & Rosa 'Betsy Sinclair'

Mellow Yellow - Donovan

I'm just mad about saffron

A-saffron's mad about me

I'm-a just mad about saffron

She's just mad about me

 

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow

 

I'm just mad about fourteen

Fourteen's mad about me

I'm-a just mad about-a fourteen

A-she's just mad about me

 

They call me mellow yellow

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow

 

Born-a high forever to fly

A-wind-a velocity nil

Born-a high forever to fly

If you want, your cup I will fill

 

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow

 

So mellow yellow

Electrical banana

Is gonna be a sudden craze

Electrical banana

Is bound to be the very next phase

 

They call it mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow

Saffron, yeah

I'm just-a mad about her

I'm-a just-a mad about-a saffron

She's just mad about me

They call it mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow

Oh, so yell

Monday, July 10, 2023

 

I remember that when we arrived from Mexico City in Vancouver in 1975 I tried to look for a photo job. At London Drugs I was asked what I did by a man behind a counter. I told him, “I am a portraitist”. He became very angry, “I studied in McGill and I don’t call myself that.” And that was the end of my attempts so I worked for a couple of years washing cars at Tilden-Rent-A-Car on Alberni Street.

My mother often told me that a house is not a home without pictures on the wall. Because of the recent flooding in my house I had to remove pictures from the walls. This one of Rebecca taken in 2005 has been staring at me in my bedroom for almost two months.

I will put it up, where it was, on the little wall facing me when I walk down the stairs.

Today I knew I had to write about it.

Because  have been a magazine photographer since 1977 I believe I can define for myself what is a good portrait. Many times when I took my contact sheets to Vancouver Magazine I had an 8x10 print in my car that I did not bring in. Both Rick Staehling and Chris Dahl would invariably choose the photograph (a portrait) from the contact sheet that matched the one in the car. I followed the protocol and appeared the next day with the photograph.

For many years I relied on studio lights to take my portraits. Then, and especially now, I believe that lighting helps a photographer to achieve what I call the Holy Grail of Photography – an identifiable style.

With cellphone captures (unlit) that kind of style is now history.

My studio was in the corner of Robson and Granville and it had four large windows. Across the street was the Eaton’s (then Sears) building with its massive white wall. Light was reflected from that wall and it came into my studio.

In the many times that architect Arthur Erickson came to pose for me he would invariably mention the quality of the light in the studio and called it “God’s Light”. And of course I would be connecting my studio flashes.

But I did literally see the light when my daughter Alexandra was making up Rebecca in the studio. I noticed the light and dispensed with my flashes.

There is something about this portrait that is remarkable and I would rest my case if someone asked me, “What are you?”

“I am a portraitist.”

Sunday, July 09, 2023

Rosa 'Buttercup' & Geraniums 'Delft Blue', 'Rozanne' & 'Buxton Blue' 9 July 2023

 

Today I scanned three blue hardy geraniums with two blooms of Rosa ‘Buttercup’. I checked my past blogs and I have written quite a few and will include them here below. One is in Spanish and Jorge Luís Borges explains that as he was going blind the last two colours he could discern were yellow and blue.

Los Colores de Jorge Luís Borges

L' 'houre bleue - Joan Didion 

The Yellow and the Blue - Forgetting to Remember 

Yellow she affords - Emily Dickinson

Grief and the yellow and the blue 

Rosemary's Blue

There are more but ¡Yá!

I keep writing about this theme because it is all about my memory of Rosemary. When I walk in what used to be our garden but is now only mine, when I spot yellow and blue I am quick to snip. And snip I did today.

If anybody gets this far I would like to reiterate that my plant images are not photographs but scanographs. This means I am a scanographer. I believe that the scanner is a technology that is virtually forgotten in this century. With few people asking me to photograph them my scanner is now my tabletop camera. It keeps me distracted a tad but at the same time since I have over 3000 scans (I began in 2001) I see this as a fun thing during the process but beyond that I think of the futility.

Epson Perfection V700 Photo

 

More and more I think exactly like my friend Abraham Rogatnick who told me a year before he died, “I am not long for this world and I am glad for it.”

My cat Niño is back and he and Niña give me company on the bed. He eats a bit. He is quite thin. He might survive a year. Niño, my family and friends are all in a route of decay like me.

Oblivion beckons.