25 July 2025 at the Blue Light Studios

 Art Bergman & Stephen Drake - Passion

Yesterday 25 July, 2025 I went to the Blue Light Studios to listen to a duo. The duo was Art Bergmann accompanied by Steven Drake. I met both of them before they knew each other in 1979.

Since that date, both men have served as inspiration for me to continue doing not only what I like but also what I think I do well.

Art Bergman I would define as a former punk rocker as in the last few years he writes lyrics that protest mankind’s inhumanity to man. We no longer have Joan Baez or Chilean Violeta Parra. Protest folk is moribund. Bergmann is reviving it with his songs.

Steven Drake in my amateur opinion is the finest electric guitar player in Canada. Because he is a competent sound engineer, in any concert he appears, you will witness good sound. Last night Bergmann’s hearing aid battery kept failing and he sometimes got muddled with the lyrics of his songs. This in no way affected Drake who with a smile on his face managed. And he managed with excellence. Since he was not a soloist in his band or playing standing in Art Bergmann’s recent quintets he still showed excellence in his playing without needing to show off. 

What is most peculiar, and I smiled, is that during some of Bergmann’s toughest songs with tough lyrics Bergmann smiled. A man who in his past was an extremely angry man has softened his stance and that went well with the audience.

For me, now that I no longer work for magazines or newspapers, I feel liberated in that I can take photographs with an edge. My slow shutter photographs satisfy me.

I am sure that both Bergmann and Drake would understand.

Hosta 'Green Fountain' 26 July 2025

My RAE (Real Academia Española) on line dictionary defines obsession (in Spanish obsesión) as:

Del lat. obsessio, -ōnis 'asedio'.

It seems that the word comes from Latin to lay siege. These days I am sieged by an obsession to scan my garden plants. When I started in 2002 and had beginner’s luck my purpose was to accurately portray a plant at 100% size, accurate colour and to include the day’s date. I thought at the time that gardeners elsewhere might want to know how a rose in June in Vancouver would compare to one in Toronto or Berlin. That did not happen.

Now and in the last couple of years I have become fussy with my scans as I spend lots of time rearranging my plants and moving leaves. I find that one scan is not enough. Why?

I am getting artsy. Accuracy is not quite out of the window yet. I have discovered the fun I get in interpreting the plant in more than one way. The case in point are these four scan of the green hosta Hosta ‘Green Fountain’. Hosta collectors and enthusiasts would scoff at my interest in an ordinary green hosta from a past when there weren’t as many variegated hostas as now (over 7500 of them are registered.).

Brachyglottis greyii & Rosa 'Fair Bianca'

 

I often listen to people say, “If I think it is art, it is art.” A variant is,”What I do is art because I think it is art.” I never pursue these statements and I keep quiet. Besides not wanting to offend I have a problem figuring out if what I do is art.

In that 20^th century Irving Pen, George Hurrell and other portrait photographers were deemed artists. They had a recognizable style. Cartier-Bresson is seen as an artist.

With the proliferation of street photography in this century (Cartier Bresson was a pioneer) there are so many phoitographers doing it that I am not sure that shooting a street scene with telephone can be art.

Sally Mann and Cindy Sherman lean in the direction of conceptual photography. Conceptual art, particularly in Vancouver is seen as art.

All the above is but a prologue to explore some of my flatbed scanner work which I do every day. Some say that if you do something “artistic” every day to satisfy yourself it is irrelevant if others think it is art or not.

What you see here is a Fuji medium format instant print (I call them Fujiroids) of one of my Rosemary’s favourite grey plants Senecio greii and English Rose, Rosa ‘Fair Bianca’. Rosemary’s plant has gone through a name change and it is now Brachyglottis greyii.

I found the Fujiroid in a pile and I wondered what it would look like scanned.

Is this art?

Family Legacy that can be Held

Not About Cantinflas 
 

Living in the home of a portrait photographer can be a melancholic drag. On Monday morning in preparation for the piano tuner I had to remove the family frames that were on a doily (anybody under 30 would not know what that is). Today I put them back and became sad realizing that the framed portraits represented events that will never return. A couple of the frames are pewter Seagull frames that used to be made in Pugwash, Nova Scotia. Seagull at one time had a shop on Robson and also The Bay and Eaton’s sold them. When I visited my family in Argentina I often took these frames as presents as they represented something of Canada’s excellence. The third frame is a slightly damaged Mexican one.

I have a chest that is full of my grandmother’s doilies. What is to become of them once I am gone? 

The cat was Plata. She was my cat while Rosemary had Casi. Somehow when cats die if you get a new one immediately (that has been our method all these years) the old cats live on in the new ones. Their "catness" is passed on.