Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Browsing Category

Nature

Oaks Bottom Nature Preserve

· Oaks Amusement Park ·

Rotkappchen copy

We conclude this week’s explorations with a location close to home: Oaks Bottom, a 141 acres nature preserve with a lake, marshland and little streams. Located in SE Portland, with views of downtown and the Willamette, it is home to many birds and other wildlife, in particular scores of herons due to nearby rookeries. Well maintained paths make for easy hiking, and around Christmas the adjacent train tracks are used for a Santa steam engine train which delights children of all ages. The park came into existence because of neighborhood action in the late 1960s when industrial development threatened and was eventually stopped with the city purchasing the area and building the preserve partially on a sanitation landfill.

Tributary copy

Between the preserve and the river resides the Oaks Amusement park, one of the oldest in the country. Known as Coney Island on the Willamette it opened on May 30, 1905, 2 days before the Lewis&Clark Exposition.(Short history here:http://www.pdxhistory.com/html/oaks_park.html.) It is a sweet place to visit if you do not mind a high noise level from screaming kids on rollercoasters, loud music from the carousels and lots of voices on the megaphone calling for the next round of fun or lost children. The lead montage is based on a photograph of a little girl dancing there around the pavilion during May festivities.

oakspark4

Today’s painting is the 1916 Merry-Go-Round by Mark Gertler. A letter written by Gertler’s friend D. H. Lawrence in September 1915 mentions wounded soldiers in uniforms enjoying the rowdy entertainment at the fair. Another letter by Lawrence in 1916 describes the painting as “the best modern picture I have seen: I think it is great and true.” This opionion was not widely shared, his work being scolded as modernist and decorative.  The painting is now judged as his reaction to World War I; Gertler was a conscientious objector and quite worried about being conscripted into the British Army.

Mark_Gertler_-_Merry-Go-Round_-_Google_Art_Project

2 Comments

Les Corbeaux

· Bonus: Trompe L'Oeil at the Louvre ·

Crow(n) of Thorns copy

If memory can be trusted – and I wouldn’t, necessarily – the background of this montage was based on a photograph taken two years ago at the Louvre. Something about that luscious chair appealed. The focus, however, was supposed to be the crow – a bird species I hold special feelings for. When my children were young I convinced them (probably one of the last times I convinced them of anything) that I could communicate with crows, and you could see me flapping about the backyard, wildly cawing, to the consternation of the bird population and probably the amusement of the rest of the neighborhood.

Crows are not just quite intelligent birds, they are culturally adaptive, superb tool makers and sport an incredible multitude of voices and expressions. For a short introduction there is the TED talk below, for longer perusal there is an interesting book, In the Company of Crows and Ravens, by John M. Marzluff.

https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows?language=en

DSC_0084 copy 7

If you are lucky enough to travel to Paris in the next months and if the Louvre is on your list of things to see, you will be surprised. The I.M. Pei pyramid in the courtyard, so controversial at its inception and so beloved now, is playing hide and seek. Muralist JR, commissioned by the museum, is casting a trompe l’oeil spell over the structure. The article below explains in more detail (and is surprisingly catty when discussing work of another graffiti artist, Banksy.) https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/may/26/louvre-pyramid-trompe-l-oeil-jr-im-pei-paris-museum  I, by the way, when first visiting, was startled by all these people in front of the pyramid holding up their arms until I inquired: if you photograph them from a specific angle, it looks as if they are touching the top of the pyramid.  Another bit of useless knowledge crowding my brain……

5045

IMG_2415

IMG_2409
1 Comments

Wide Open Spaces

· The threat to public lands ·

Die Linse copy

Dufur, population 607, is a small hamlet south of The Dalles. I found those antelope skulls in a shop window, years in a row, I might add. Photographed them on my way South to Harney County, paradise for bird lovers and hell for inhabitants visited upon by marauding militias. The attached article is a political piece on the threat to our public lands – I felt it was instructive, saddening and infuriating in equal measure. Be warned, it’s also quite long.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176141/tomgram%3A_william_debuys%2C_no_more_wide_open_spaces/#more

I wonder if it was a coincidence that the occupation of the Malheur Refuge Field Station happened in a county that had made enormous progress in forging alliances and compromises between players at various ends of the spectrum, from conservationist to land owners to state administrators. But the very fact that a shared attempt towards problem solving was in the works gives me hope – so let’s focus on that.

Regardless which way you travel through Oregon, you find vistas of irreplaceable beauty in those various open spaces, from the aspen groves on Mt. Hood, to the canyons of Eastern OR to the beaver creeks of Harney County. And here I’m with Woodie Guthrie:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxiMrvDbq3s – it’s our land.

IMG_0829 copy 6

Knossos copy 9

DSC_0667

DSC_0615

DSC_0578

2 Comments

Put a Bird on it!

· or: the long reach of cultural clichées ·

DSC_0603Some years back, shortly after the show Portlandia had targeted the intersection between art and commercialism with the meme Put a Bird on it!, some cultural journalist in Salon wrote about her acute discomfort when purchasing bird-related art and/or craft. She had become self-conscious in the wake of the joke, wondering if she – as so many of us – was the butt of it. She described the feeling with a newly invented German term – der Vogelschäme – which cracked me up since it captured the emotional reaction perfectly, but was all wrong linguistically. (It would be die Vogelscham – the bird shame.)

I am no longer easily laughing at it, since it has become clear to me that cultural trends and stereotypes exert demand characteristics that are hard to ignore. As an artist it is difficult to navigate a world where art that inflames, defies and disturbs is considered more important than art that expresses simple beauty or unfiltered portraits of nature. And I believe this is doubly true for women artists. Having said that, I can, of course, think of several women painters who are perfectly accepted into the canon of modern art while painting still lives or fairytale scenes. Or are they?

In any case, I have had to work on myself to allow serious time spent with bird and landscape montages, rather than my usual topics of social justice and displacement.  I consider that progress and will celebrate it with today’s picture of the sweetest, simplest, and  – yes – cutest bird I could find in my recent photographs.

6 Comments

Welcome to the Neighborhood!

· Portland: a paradise for urban birders ·

On the wire copy 3In the small German village where I grew up villager solidarity increased proportionally to the amount of nightly noise produced by a band of roaming peacocks. A miniature version of this is happening in my current neighborhood where the neighborly greetings of each other start with the question, “did they keep you up all night as well?” A pair of very loud and very much in love owls is filling the air from sun down to sun rise.

The fact that this experience is possible 10 minutes from downtown Portland – well, make that 25 now with the traffic – makes me happy. Add owls to the larger  species of birds we now regularly see within the urban environment, bald eagles, hawks, peregrine falcons, ospreys, cormorants, herons, to name some of them. Geese, how could I forget geese?

The photomontage above used a photograph of an osprey taken on SE Division, close to the railroad tracks. The red-tail hawk who is taking off in the background was photographed on Sauvies Island.

3 Comments

Phoenix from the Ashes

· Your daily picture resumes ·

DSC_0483 copyAfter more than 5 years of sending a daily picture to an ever growing number of people via email I have now shifted to the blog format. There will be a daily photograph or montage, there will be a weekly theme that holds the images together and, of course, there will be the occasional text. The only change will be the way in which it can be accessed.  You can go to the site anytime you wish at www.heuermontage.com or you can sign up for the blog (once I’ve figured out how that can be done….) then it will be automatically sent to your inbox.

And given the metaphoric use of the phoenix, let’s start with birds for the last week of April 2016 – dancing sandhill cranes.

 

 

3 Comments
© 2026