Sarah is the second artist I am profiling while at the Baer Art Center in Iceland. Sarah lives in Boston, is American and teaches at the Art Institute of Boston(AIB) at Lesley University. Go here to see her website. Sarah is primarily a painter but draws and makes mixed media pieces as well, particularly making grids out of small wood panels.

Sarah is an accomplished artist with now a long career teaching and exhibiting her work. I had a conversation with her the other day in my studio in Iceland.

In asking her about her early career path as a painter I learned she studied at Wesleyan with a stint abroad in Rome through Tyler, and did her graduate work in painting at Pratt in NYC. She cites early influences as being Van Gogh, abstract expressionists Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, etc. I added that I felt that seeing those artists early in one's career could be a way to understand that there are possibilities and/or careers that could go down a similar path. She agreed and said that those artist's work informed her that there was a far bigger world out there than simple representation and/or figurative work. Sarah was the daughter of a teacher and an American literature professor and  grew up in Portland, Maine and has several sisters who are either full time artists or have been in arts related fields their whole lives. She is married with a teenage son and lives in Jamaica Plain, MA which is a neighborhood of Boston.

Sarah is also a career teacher with stints at Carnegie Mellon, Tyler, Oberlin, Holy Cross and Wellesley. 

We have been making slide presentations of our work while we are here and Sarah presented her work a few nights ago. I'll show you a few pieces from her slide show:We learned that night that, while earlier works usually came from something she read or something going on with her (pregnancy, breast feeding, etc), more recent work over the past several years came from a more intuitive place

with some repetitive themes such as the painting above that uses scorched wooden panels. Because she works on smaller wood pieces that then get assembled on the wall as a larger piece, many of her paintings are quite large, sometimes as much as 8 or 10 feet across.

These are difficult to show here because they are large in reality. They are shocking when projected on a big screen and I can't wait to see some real pieces when I get back home. There is a level of detail and depth to this work that is wonderful as they seem to go back and back and back.

The painting above is shown full size. And below is a detail from that painting:

I was blown away by her work, her work ethic and her quiet force not only as a painter but also as a person. It is an honor to be a resident here in Iceland with her.

Sarah at work on a new painting in her studio at Baer:

Sarah's work is represented in Boston by Ellen Miller Gallery.

It's simple really. It isn't really complicated, intricate or difficult. It all gets noisy and over wrought, of course. We make for many of our own problems, in the visual creativity game. I know I do. But it isn't hard. We just have to look and see.

Photography comes all preloaded with all kinds of problems. Think about it: in a fraction of a second we go from, what is now a sensor, but it used to be a piece of  film, a blank slate to one that is jammed packed full of information. Compare that to a bare canvas when the first brush stroke is applied. Thinking this way you can see how hard it is. We can't back up after the shutter's fired at 1/250 of a second, or rub something out with an eraser to start over. We can shoot another frame and another and God knows we do but once the light's been gathered by the lens and focused down onto a light sensitive something that these days is most often very small then there it is, we've got it, come hell or high water. It's an odd way to work when you take that device out into the world and use it to capture it. 

These are the kinds of thoughts rambling around in my brain as I sit up here at what feels like the top of the world in Hofsos Iceland at 5 am on a morning where it never really got dark last night and won't again tonight.

Here's another in a group where I've set up the camera in the same place every few hours and shot one off:

Why? OMG, why wouldn't you? Because you can, because you should. The last time I had a chance to photograph this way, with this kind of simple and elegant beauty right outside my door, this reductive landscape of magnificent proportions and scale? Never, that's when.

Here, as I am learning, all you really have to do is amp up your sensitivity to what is here, be here, really fully be here, and watch it change right in front of you in a kind of observationally acute awareness to simply what is there. Simple, really.

Aaron Siskind, one of my teachers in graduate school and a man I grew to love very much said to me once, early in my time there, "Neal, do it simple". He didn't mean I was simple (or he might have as at the time I would characterize myself as being pretty clueless), he meant that when you start out and you don't know too much you probably will do better trying to make simple and clear statements rather that intricate, involved, complicated or ornate ones. It took me a while to get to that, to understand what he was saying and the wisdom of his words. Of course, the best teaching applies across disciplines, has relevance in almost any field and his certainly did. Isn't eloquence in its purest of forms most always very simple? Brilliance a kind of minimal peeling away of noise pared down to an essential? I like to think so.

OK. Neal getting all kinds of deep here. But again how could you not when you have countless hours and days to contemplate? This residency is that more than any other I've been on, a real getting off whatever ride you've been on, a chance to look back at your life in all its complexity and its routines and examine what is important and what is not. Transformative? I can't say for sure but amongst our group of residents here we are talking this way, confirming each other's belief that we are experiencing something more profound than just a month away on a pretty island.

I will break my rule here and throw one in one made about 20 minutes ago at about 90 degrees from the above ones, turning the camera to the left:

Enough said?

If you've been following the posts on my time so far in Iceland you know that we are no longer at the beginning part of being here. Things have settled down a little after the first couple of days of "shock and awe" at the beauty of the place. We've had some cold and rainy weather and then, after going into town in the morning for a swim in the local pool yesterday, we came back to enough of a break in the weather for me to go out and work a little.

I took a walk down this farm road:

Staggering enough on its own but little did I know what was going to happen as I got to the water. Everything was wet, it was gray with the sky packed with clouds and fog shrouding the Cape off to the right. I was headed off to the small bump you see in the above picture to the left in the frame.

I know what you're thinking, particularly if you've been reading these for a while: "Am I going to be looking at a Rantoul series here?" Maybe, but not yet, as I will need to work here some more.

Anyway, this was a real discovery as I hadn't been down here yet. Let me give you a reference of where we are now. The Baer Art Center is, turning 180 degrees from the above picture, here:

Onward:

As I begin to climb that "bump" I find that Scott Johnson, one of the four other residents, is already in place. Scott is a professor of art at Colorado College in Colorado Springs and is an installation artist/sculptor/photographer on a post tenure sabbatical leave. Here is a brief biography of Scott: Bio.

As I come up to the top of the cliff I begin to see that this will not just be a rocky beach but will have some real substance.  Iceland will not disappoint:

By now I am on top of the cliff and I can get a sense of the coast and how the geology is exceptional. This is like nothing in my experience:

At the very edge of the cliff, if I turn left, I have this:

And to the right there is this:with Scott still perched up there on the top of his cliff shooting a time lapse video. A little later, I can't resist this with a long lens:

Back to work. At 66 years old I am definitely not scampering up and down this terrain the way I used to but I manage to get at a few places that are wonderful:

Then, beginning to head back, I come across this, where a small stream exits out into the ocean:This is the natural causeway that leads out to the Cape. More rocks in one place than it is possible to comprehend.

Finally, looking to the right and heading back to the studio before dinner there is this:

I will stop here. I did go back after dinner and worked until about 10. It is very strange but it doesn't really get dark here, ever. I will write a post about that in the future as it messes with your mind and body in odd ways.

At any rate, that's what I've been up to. I know I promised a profile of one of the other artists, Mahala. It is coming but she wanted more time to work.

Please, drop me an email with comments or questions about this place, the pictures or anything else.  Neal's email

So, Mahala and I are picked up at the bus stop by Steinunn, who is the force behind the residencies at Baer.  It was Steinunn who started them about six years ago. She co-designed the building we five artists stay in and makes it all happen for us. Remarkable:

This is our common room where we meet, talk, show each other our websites, have a coffee or breakfast. What's it like out there, through that door? I thought you'd never ask:

This is what it looked like as we arrived, still raining and cloudy. We learned that what looks like an island out there is actually connected by a rock causeway and is called "The Cape".

Here's what it looks like in better conditions:

If I turn the camera around 180 degrees this is what I see:

That's the common room in the front, then the five separate artist studios along the rest of the building. My studio looks like this:

with its own bedroom and bathroom. Yes, this is good, very very good. This place is called the Baer Art Center  and it is about the most beautiful place I've ever been. Actually, it's a little overwhelming, to be truthful. I am writing this a couple of days after arriving as it was all a little too much. I've calmed down some since then and  feel like I am coping with being in this place somewhat better but it is still hard to grasp how completely stupendously gorgeous it is:

All these pictures made from right here, about 50 feet from where my studio is. Easy. Just point the camera and go "click". OMG! You know how intimidating that is? I mean what the hell can I do that compares to this place, just what it is? I found myself, that first day, close to tears in dismay while on the edge of laughter at my good fortune. Strange state of mind, probably at least partially due to jet lag and disorientation.

So, where do I go from here, my readers? I am not exactly sure. If you were following this blog last winter when I was in San Diego, I faced a desert of different proportions. Back then, I was struggling to find something to grab onto photographically in the middle of a very large city (San Diego). Here I am way out on the fringe, at the northern edge of the country up close to the arctic circle that is an island of only 300,000 people, with a short walk down to the edge of the North Sea at a fjord. As I fix breakfast or sit with one of the four other residents I look out at:

Whether or not this can turn into a place photographically rich for me is still unknown but I have to ask you: how cool is that?

My friend Lia Rothstein was here on a residency last year. Lia lives in Vermont and was the owner of Photo Stop Gallery for many years in White River Junction. She asked me to please not plague her with how good it is as she misses it very much and longs to come back. But I am writing here to a larger cause as the place is simply unbelievable!

While I struggle with what to do I am planning a lateral move and that is to share with you the work of the other artists that are here.

Mahala Magins will be first, a young Australian painter of really exceptional abilities.(Mahala's website)

This is the third post on arriving in Iceland and we'll look at photographs I made on the five hour bus ride and then in the next post I will show you my home for the next month. The Baer Center is located at the top edge of the country near a little town called Hofsos.

Update to this post: The full series called "Bus Trip" is now on the site.

After boarding the bus in Reykavik I got to thinking about the pictures my friend and colleague Michael Hintlian makes from trains and busses and thought I'd give it a try.

And quickly discovered this is far harder than you'd think. Fast shutter, slow shutter, use reflections, don't allow reflections, focus close, focus far? 

I even tried shooting out the back of the bus.

We also stopped a few times, once for 30 minutes for lunch so I made a few pictures and might've gotten a little diverted.

This was made out of sheer lust. Even in the rain, how cool to be on a road trip on this, barreling along these two lane roads in very rural Iceland in the summer?

Two that are the same, but different:

Anyway, back on the bus, Mahalla passed out and I made a few more pictures:

I will stop here and show us next where the five of us as residents are now living and working. Iceland Baer coming up.