News

The Thoreau Society in Concord, MA recently relocated its Annual Gathering to the
Trinity Episcopal Church at 81 Elm Street in Concord. The Gathering had previously been held in the Masonic Lodge (1820) without AC. Perhaps global warming pressed this change as the annual schedule coincides with Thoreau's birthday, July 12.

This year's theme was "Thoreau's Revolution" commemorating John Lennon,--- No No the
250th anniversary of the shots fired in Concord, Ma in 1775 marking the commencement of the Revolutionary War. Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1837 poem "Concord Hymn" includes the much quoted phrase in the first verse:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

For Thoreau followers, Emerson is never far away. But for many, Henry is the beacon of radical thought and his very being is a flame around which we circle.

Because the Episcopal Church's large meeting room is also an impressive gallery space the Thoreau Society asked for submissions on "Thoreau's Revolution" as their first ever Art Exhibition. I was included in the 20 works, each with statements. The show will be on the walls through August 2025.

Fire in Winter, Walden Woods, Concord, MA 43x40"


My statement on Thoreau and Revolution:

Thoreau saw scant distinctions between mind, body, and the nature that surrounded him.
This is a revolutionary concept that was for Thoreau as natural as breathing.
The evolution of organic nature feeds man’s evolution in moral and intellectual reality.

Fire in Winter seems contradictory. But only in the synergy between all existing forces, can life persist.

"There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill.” Henry David Thoreau From his essay “A Winter’s Walk “ 1843
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Somehow I can well imagine Henry Thoreau and John Lennon having a remarkable exchange.

Well... Winter on "Old Cape Cod" is finally over and I am trying to ponder some focused landscape images.
But in lieu of that, I am visiting local nature sites - picking up ticks, floating in ponds.

Without big energy for digesting, I nibble on Halloween - October is almost here.
To supplement, I have taken a few side trips into the world of Edward Gorey who lived in Yarmouth Port on Strawberry Lane.

The 100th Anniversary of Edward's birth was February 22, 2025 with a birthday fete devised for his fans. A few guests appeared dressed like Gorey himself in a fur coat and sneakers, and a few others came as characters from Gorey's odd and winsome books.

My inner smile was piqued, but I was not feeling the great man's presence.

At the tail end of the party I wandered about and took a few snaps that I did not think would amount to much.
Happily for me, a slippery dream appeared.

The Doubtful Guest bids Edward Gorey "Bonne chance" for his next 100.


Ghosts.. Strawberry Lane, October 31, 2024


Leaves, Barnstable, MA 2024


Bat Frolic (Catwalk, Catskill, NY)

Edward Gorey left part of his estate to Bat Conservation International. Gorey perhaps first encountered bat power when he served in the US Army at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah during WWII. The Utah site was the hub for big plans to use bats in combat. It may be assumed that Edward followed the "Bat Bomb" story, with an unknown number of bats forfeited in the process.

Bat and bat-box photographed at the Edward Gorey House. The formal garden is from the Catwalk Institute where I have spent some time.

How to get through this period - raw to the bone - January-February, 2025.
Not to mention the other tortures we are experiencing and bracing for daily via news outlets and social media.
The carnage is morally and emotionally shattering.

I am still new to the Cape and I am wandering beyond my usual routes to discover landmarks or views.
These real-time experiences can sometimes reset my equilibrium. In the seeming safety of my landscape environment, a high vista of empty ocean can conjure thoughts of a less fractured time, or on the other hand - send me out to the deep.

And so, ----- Whales and whaling have come to mind.
I am reading an absorbing book on Herman Melville titled "Dayswork" by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Babel. It is a pageturner.

On the day a friend recommended this book, I came upon a whale carving fashioned from baleen (whale material). The two events were tossed together in my birthday salad.

A passing interest in whaling began in 1994 when I spent a month on Nantucket. Whaling is powerfully mysterious, strange, dangerous, and oddly exotic to someone born in New York City.

Sperm Whale cut from baleen. Ten inches - acquisition number penned on back.


Below: Herman Melville writes to Sophia Hawthorne.
Lifted from Dayswork (I thank and simultaneously apologize to the authors in advance):

Life is a long Dardenelles.
The shores we pass are bright with flowers.
We want to pluck them, but the banks are too steep.
And so we just keep floating.
We float on and on, looking for a place to land.
Until swoop! we launch into the great sea!

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To mingle with local Cape people I submitted to a winter show targeting children (vacation week) and my "Sparrow" was chosen along with other artists' pieces with "trick" or intriguing surfaces. Currently at the Cotuit Center for the Arts.

Below: "Sparrow" -- digital scan of 35mm negative.

In my recent exhibit "Following Henry"(see previous post) I included a few images from my Ocean/Shell series (with shells) to fill the display cases and add a bit of entertainment.

Shipwrecks were common in Thoreau's era globally. Powerful seas tossed wooden hulls into rocks or simply threw them over.
The same seas moved seashells about for centuries and beyond, but shelled creatures are better able to withstand a little wind and water.

The travel of seashells seems mysteriously random, but that is my impression because I cannot see them on their journeys.
I can only imagine where they have been after I pick one up on the beach.




Yes there is a shelled creature that collects smaller shells, attaches them with secreted "glue" and carries the appendages along. A general term for this resourceful construction is the "carrier shell."

Another shell (below) imbued with special travel skills is the Paper Nautilus - also called Argonaut. A short discussion of this traveler is in a News Post here on my website - scroll down to July 2021.

l was happy to find an antique engraving showing the Argonaut sailing on the ocean. A detailed description is directly below the photo below.



The shell featured above is "Argonaut" or "Paper Nautilus."

Argonaut is "an adventurer engaged in a quest" and refers to an ocean journey.
The boat-like shape of the Paper Nautilus shell has also been mythically linked
to the legendary boat Argo and the explorers who set off in Greek lore to find
the Golden Fleece.

When I first encountered this shell in my hand, it struck me as a ghost-like
form that seemed to float through space and time.

The Argonauta, Argonaut, or Paper Nautilus is a sea octopus housed in a
paper-thin egg case. The case is created and used by the female to house eggs
and help her power through the water. The male does not create these unique forms.

One early fanciful rendering of the Argonaut octopus is shown cruising on
the ocean. The shell case here resembles a boat and the octopus arms become
sails (and resemble paddles). This creatures travels long distances near
the surface of the ocean.

The print of the boating Argonaut is from the 1807 publication by William Wood
titled Zoography or The Beauties of Nature Displayed.

My show "Following Henry - From Walden to Cape Cod" has opened in downtown Concord and will be on exhibit through July. The Thoreau Society included the show in their Annual Gathering agenda, and I gave a gallery talk focusing on my recent series of images shot on Cape Cod.


My Cape series includes a narrative that weaves my Outer Cape experiences with some of Henry Thoreau's commentary found in his book Cape Cod.

To view this series with the narrative CLICK ON BOLD TEXT HERE: Your text to link here...

I included some materials on Cape Cod shipwrecks in my exhibit. As I was preparing the show I remembered an unidentified period photograph I purchased 25 years ago at a yard sale. Fantasizing that the image could be a Cape wreck I started searching for a comparable image.

Bingo -- after several Google searches, an image appeared from a book published in 1902 with the title "Lifesavers of Cape Cod." The book reproduction had no identification other than "The Matilda Buck." Using this name I found a Pinterest image of the Matilda Buck from a different vantage point and the 1890 date. I was pleased also that the posting claimed a Provincetown, MA location, and noted that all aboard had been rescued.


The Matilda Buck as found in the 1902 publication "Lifesavers of Cape Cod."
I also own a period print of this image that has no identification.


The Matilda Buck, 1890 Provincetown.
Pulled from a Pinterest posting hoping to locate the whereabouts of the salvage remains from this ship.

Below some show installation shots. I remembered also a famous Winslow Homer painting
"The Life Line" depicting a woman being rescued froma shipwreck. I found detailed instructions of how these metal lines were installed and used to transfer those shipwrecked from boat to shore, and a map of the hundred known named wrecks along Cape Cod -"Marine Disasters of Cape Cod."

On this Winter Solstice day in 2023, I find myself with an unfamiliar view from my window.
Finally --I have moved.
Gazing at this new pattern of trees in an ever-changing mix of color and light -- offers me a puzzle I don't intend to solve.

Ten years ago I photographed on a Winter Solstice in Florida and produced the image below.

After I completed this -- "Exercise in Blue and Beige"(lame joke) -- I was uneasy with the result and spent an inordinate amount of time (months, years) making another version where all the edges were merged into a seeming one-frame composition.

Is version No. 2 any "better" than this one?
After hundreds of tweaks in real-time, any judgments I might make now seem irrelevant. One reality had become something else.

Back to now -now past. The move from my old farm property was arduous --the physical and mental labor harrowing. This journey seemed endless, with the final push being 6 months of daily mucking, hauling, giving away, - - leaving. The fact that I was able to tear myself from one reality and emerge in another -- was miraculous.. or murderous, depending.

In the moving process, I uncovered artwork completed in graduate school and much earlier. Other items I vaguely remembered appeared to be lost. Hand-written letters opened up to phrases that were wonderfully familiar from dear, now-gone companions. This process of dipping my hand into the caldron of the past, barbs and all, was staggering.

A few weeks before my final leave-taking, I swept the dirt floor of the root cellar in my old house, poking at ancient cobwebs. I was disturbing decades/centuries of debris that had settled at its own pace. I was reaching back into time and could sense multiple life reviews paging forward to the present and beyond.

As I worked, I recalled a 1991 event.

On a Winter's night in 1991, I heard a commotion in my basement. ...Hark.
I pointed my shaking torch from the staircase to find that a woodchuck or some other tunneling creature had broken through old floorboards, creating a tall pile of shards. I yelled and banged - then closed the door on the scurrying sounds. A trusted friend soon poured concrete to keep such visits at bay, but the root cellar was spared this improvement. Entering through a 5' hand-planked door with a tiny irregular-cut window, this sanctuary has remained largely as it was - the huge stones of the foundation and rich soil have not changed significantly, smelling fresh and vital - nature renewing itself in mysterious ways.

And now in a new home with hollow doors and working appliances, I want piled-up artwork and possessions to disappear - to vanish into a climate-controlled vault in the sky -- just bill-me/auto-pay. I keep the door closed to my new workspace, a study in chaos.

Please - can I wake up only to my fresh view of treetops and high-flying birds -- and be catapulted into a new life, without the sinews pulling me back to where I cannot go?

I have a few images from the past reemerging for public viewing.

A large car image "Imu (Earth Oven Hawaii)" was originally shot with film on the Big Island of Hawaii is currently on the walls at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, MA. A description of the image is at this link https://www.amyragus.com/imu-earth-oven-hawaiil

Imu (Earth Oven) Hawaii 2015 Digital image scanned from negatives shot in 1998

This early Walden Pond collage titled "Secrets, Walden Pond" will appear in an article about my photo process in the Thoreau Society Bulletin this June with three other images and writing modified from my "Content" page on this website.

Secrets, Walden Pond - This is a cut-and-paste collage from film C Prints. Prints and posters of this image were made by having an 8x10" transparency shot with a large format camera. The transparency was then drum scanned for a file, and prints were manufactured, involving multiple proofs. The process was highly expensive and lengthy. Then came digital cameras and Photoshop.

Two images from my recent virtual show at the Arnold Arboretum are on exhibit in the Arboretum's visitor center. The show "Artist Redux/Seen Again" Feb 3 -March 12, 2023, includes work from 11 artists who had online shows during the pandemic.

Tree Play (detail) Arnold Arboretum Boston October 2019

The 10 other artists are Anthony Apesos, Arlene Bandes, Lizi Brown, Madge Evers, Lynda Goldberg, Beth Maisel, Amy McGregor-Radin, Gayle Smalley Bruce Wilson, and Ginny Zanger. During the pandemic when the buildings were closed to the public Gallery Director Sheryl White set up detailed virtual exhibits that included links, artist interviews, and other materials. The 20 works from my 2021 show can be seen in my Gallery New England Woods with my commentary describing experiences prior and after the early months of the pandemic. https://www.amyragus.com/new-england-woods

Note 2023 - The Arnold Arboretum Staff removed all the virtual exhibits from the Arboretum website without notice. This I find very disrespectful. The focus in these shows was largely Arnold Arboretum-related. The time and thoughtful interviews and commentary by Sheryl White are lost. Why?

I will recreate Sheryl Whites curating of my virtual show on this site.

During my recent 2021 visit to Catskill, NY I walked the Mawignack Preserve which designates land as the home of the Mohican People and describes how they were forced out of the Hudson Valley. On my first visit to this area in 2017 I chanced upon Snake Road before the completion of the preserve. I was grateful to return.

Catskill Creek, Mohican Homelands - Trail entrance off Snake Road. (Sept 2021)


Catskill Creek from Snake Road (Catskill, NY)


Seeing Red (View from Mawignack Preserve to privately owned land)


This last photo from the Mawignack Preserve website managed by the Greene Land Trust, Coxsackie NY
Some of the text: The lands here were home for thousands of years to the Mohican people.. near the confluence of Catskill and Katterskill creeks - stood a village under the leadership of a female sachem, or principal chief named Pewasck. In April 1649 when Pewasck and her son, Supahoof, signed a deed with Brant Van Slichenhorst for a large piece of property, they received coarse woolen cloth, a beaver jacket, and a knife. ... She would have expected that her people could return to the property. Mohican people continued to be pressured out of their Hudson Valley homelands through the 17th and mid-18th centuries.... Visit Mohican.com for more information.

I am living with January Massachusetts weather - damp, cold, dark, pondering the grey, listening for birds.

A good time of year to work on new collages. So I go into farmer mode - the tilling, clearing, assessing, chopping.
An image may not be what it might be for months or years, and until exhibited, it likely isn't finished.

In Sept/Oct 2021 I returned to the Catwalk Institute in Catskill, NY to wander around the countryside.
I brought with me prints of work from my 2017 trip to Catwalk- I printed them just prior to my 2nd visit.

During this Catwalk residency, I shared the collages below with staff, board, and fellow residents. I managed to get a meeting with the Thomas Cole House.
I wanted to see how the collages looked together in real-time -- and get reactions.
For better viewing see link above - Gallery - Hudson River, NY.


The work looked… well, it looked monumental... hmm.. ..majestic maybe ?
Not words that have popped out before. I suppose brought on by the location of Catwalk - a confluence of Hudson River School energy. This place is within spitting distance of the Thomas Cole House and across the river from Olana - Frederick Church's extraordinary perch -- and Catwalk was the home of another Hudson River painter Charles Herbert Moore.

When seeing my waterfall images together, I realized that there was a power to this landscape that I had not really known viscerally.
I grew up in NYC, Westchester county, and upstate NY and had viewed the Hudson and its environs countless times. I had even given tours at the Hudson River Museum, a favorite spot for me. Hudson River paintings had been part of my environment, particularly in academic lectures, but I felt them somewhat inaccessible.

This landscape was beginning to pierce my skin, or there was some evidence now that it was.

So what could I possibly use as subject matter on this visit? I had intimidated myself.
My get-out-of-bed "theme" this trip was creeks and streams, and also the Hudson itself - the large creek.
Meandering byways, not mythic waterfalls.

This almost-finished image is Katterskill Creek, September 2021.

Anyone who has spent much time in upstate NY might recognize the pleasure of discovering a bucolic view.
On this day my head was turned up a notch by the cloud reflections and the clear weather.

It is December and the solstice is tomorrow. This is our second holiday season under the pandemic.

I have never been much for holidays, yearly plotting to spend Christmas in places where there will be no trace of it.
The Christmas story is a yes for me. It is just the rest of it.... exploitation, financial stress, buy your mate an $80k SUV or feel inadequate. Hasn't this stuff done enough damage already...

But since I mostly cannot escape I find it oddly amusing to keep my eyes peeled for suburban Christmas displays. I am grateful for the comic effects created with limited material pulled out of storage - mostly Santas, plastic bits, and the fairly constant grey skies (free!).

I haven't been to the ocean recently.

But ... two of my Ocean/Shell images are on display at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum in Baton Rouge. This group show focuses on the topic of Iridescence.

I have always been interested in the relationship between fine art and science, so I am pleased that my works are being viewed in this context. They are hung in the "Universe" gallery - great name.

In these images, I seek to penetrate the churning ocean layers that house countless shelled creatures.

The shell featured below is "Argonaut" or "Paper Nautilus." Argonaut specifically is "an adventurer engaged in a quest" and refers to an ocean journey. My thoughts go to the unknown miles a shell may travel in the deep waters.

Perhaps scientists could tag the Paper Nautilus like they do Great Whites to track where they go and what they might see.


Argonaut - In the collection of the Louisiana Art & Science Museum -LASM

And then there is the sky full of light and weather.
Powerful forces conspire to produce these swirled shapes, one more fabulous than the next.

In "Time" below the broken form does not diminish the impact of this traveler.

When I shot the ocean image for this piece I was on Nantucket. I was perhaps 3 feet from the shoreline when all of a sudden I was up to my waist.


Time

My one-person show with curatorial commentary was on the Arboretum Website until mid-2024. All the archived shows prepared remotely by artists during Covid when the gallery and buildings were closed (primarily created by local Massachusetts artists who used the Arboretum as their subject)were removed permanently.

Link: https://arboretum.harvard.edu/art_shows/a-walk-in-the-arboretum-digital-photo-collages-by-amy-ragus/ This previous link to my exhibit will take you to the Arboretum website.

Above: Spring has never failed me yet" - Arnold Arboretum April 2020.
Note: Mark Feeney's review in the Boston Globe in Reviews link (above or on the Home page)

Because there will be no reception or artist talk for my show, I have narratives of many of the images here on my website at this link:
https://amyragusartist.photium.com/october-2019-arnold-arboretum-boston

These collages were shot between Oct 2019 and August 2020. Abruptly Covid became a factor in my visits to the Arboretum. The impact of the pandemic entered my collages and perceptions of what I was experiencing. And although I abandoned many images with obviously masked visitors (how can you miss them) the pandemic became a powerful force in my choices. This subtext is mentioned but not emphasized in the Arboretum's presentation so I elaborate for the record.

Note: July 2024 - The Arnold Arboretum has decided that visual gallery shows by artists have been ended.

The Woven Tale Press has published an interview with me in conversation with Jennifer Nelson. Images appear with background bits on my life and art making.
Vol VII #9 Feb. 15, 2021

To Interview: https://www.thewoventalepress.net/photocollage-as-painting/

The Rock Newfoundland 2001 - digital collage/neg scan

Solstice meditation for 2020.


ting jing

As I prepare for an isolated Winter my thoughts are blurry with anxiety over the state of our society.

At the same time, I am not a fan of holiday commercial tyranny and am pleased that the stranglehold of Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year has been disrupted. Could we possibly live without them? hmmmm... As things stand, opting out is nearly impossible. For me, the celebration is to come on Jan. 20.

During the Halloween "season" I stumbled out and had a few adventures including a moody day in Salem when the streets were virtually empty. I attended the Edgar Allen Poe virtual conference and listened to readings of such zingers as the Tell Tale Heart and The Raven. I visited a few neighborhoods with traditions of decorating - Franklin, Wellesley, and Concord were notable. Although on Halloween night there were few trick-or-treaters, the adult suburbanites were out relishing in their decorating and the odd contrast of a mini blizzard with colorful leaves poking out. I was feeling that my usual Halloween energy was low to disappearing. Happily, at home later that evening I found that the Edward Gorey House had posted on their Facebook page an image I shot at the Gorey House last year. I was pleased beyond magic.

Halloween is really not a holiday. It is a seasonal ether that some are susceptible to, like goldenrod -- Achoo.

Untitled (Edward Gorey House Halloween 2019)

Well, I am done with Covid tainted art. I will never photograph anyone with a mask again (this does not mean Halloween of course).

The beauty of the trees will not be violated by evidence of evil infiltration.

anyway, that is how I am feeling right this minute...


Just another sunset 2020

PS don't misunderstand- masks are #1 essential for curbing this killer.

I have been doing not much visual work for a while. Swimming (thankfully) in this hot Summer weather, while watching the birds and the sky -- as close as I can get to flying.

But then again, this morning I opened files to review my visits to the Arnold Arboretum and found this piece from October 2019. It is a pretty foliage composite but at the time I didn't think it had much going on. So I made an intuitive choice of placing colored snowflakes in the sky, projecting forward a few weeks when the color will have flown away to a New England season of cold and grey. Or whatever.


Of course, now a lifetime from then I am seeing something different in the spiky symmetry of the innocent flakes.
And perhaps I should not think so much.

Fast forward 7 months. A beautiful day in May. But what is off with this picture?
Got it - a child wearing a mask in this pristine setting of the Arnold.


One of the things that changed after Covid arrived is that pre-C I always enjoyed the random and spontaneous conversations that would develop in the park. People relax and interact. Not so much these days. But on this morning a young sprite stopped to talk with me and I smiled (under my mask). Her grandmother is off stage right pushing a large baby carriage and wanting said sprite to move along home. Not the child's plan so eventually I encouraged her to go and explained in my typically interfering manner that her grandmother was working hard - pushing the baby in the heavy carriage and probably supplying drinks and snacks -- no picnic for she-who- should-be-obeyed. So the child scooted off with a parting wave and a "see you tomorrow."

We are swallowing so many losses one after another.

I almost feel guilty looking at this pink fluff.... but why resist?
When I shot this on April 26 the cherry blossoms were peaking. I was at the Arnold Arboretum early on a Sunday morning, and I sensed a lift in our collective mood.
Blossom gathering is a healthy alternative to other elixirs I might seek to ease my need for happy distractions.

On this day I was waiting for the clouds to break. As I stood observing, I witnessed two rendezvous - couples meeting in the park. These vignettes fit this stage set perfectly. And for a while, optimism wafted about.


Rendezvous, Arnold Arnold Arboretum, Boston