September 2024

Home Ground #22
Bozeman, Montana
2024

Some unrelated items on display here, but the horse and the vase have something in common because the vase is a piece of horsehair pottery. To produce horsehair pottery, the artist first heats the pottery to some insanely high temperature in a kiln and then drapes horsehairs onto its surface. They are quickly burned off and the carbon residue forms the pattern on the piece.

Home Ground #21
Bozeman, Montana
2024

My first serious photography work in the late 1960s was done using my father’s Argus C3 35mm rangefinder camera. I don’t know what happened to his old camera, but when I say this one for sale for a few bucks several decades later I bought it for old times’ sake. This one was in noticeably worse cosmetic condition than my father’s, but then it was quite a bit older by the time I acquired it.

Home Ground #20
Bozeman, Montana
2024

No rural home is complete without a set of appropriate field guides for understanding the natural world around them. I think actual print copies are still important, even in this digital age.

Home Ground #19
Bozeman, Montana
2024

My first dog Pilgrim, a German shorthaired pointer mix, spent much of her life in this house and is buried on the hill nearby. I am reminded of her every time I see these bookends.

Home Ground #18
Bozeman, Montana
2024

Since I was designing the house using inspiration from old Victorian homes, I really wanted to include a back staircase or even a hidden staircase somewhere in the house. The problem was that those old Victorian homes with those kinds of features were way larger than the 1300 square feet we were working with, so there just wasn’t room and I had to settle for just the one stairway.

Home Ground #17
Bozeman, Montana
2024

A carving by my uncle Tommy, a gifted carpenter and wood carver and one of the hardest working men I ever knew.

Home Ground #16
Bozeman, Montana
2024

Asian bells, likely one of the Fashion Queen’s garage sale finds, and unusual limestone (I think) balls that rolled out of the hillside one day when I was doing some excavating near the house with my backhoe.

Home Ground #15
Bozeman, Montana
2024

A lot of the photos in this series are of pretty static objects, i.e., they’ve been sitting in one place for years in some cases. The items here are regular features in the house as well, but they move around quite a bit–sometimes even finding their way back to the bookshelf and cupboard where they belong.

Home Ground #14
Bozeman, Montana
2024

A stack of the Fashion Queen’s vintage luggage collection.

Home Ground #12
Bozeman, Montana
2024

I designed our house back in 1981-1982, before personal computers and CAD programs were in common use. So I drew it all out on graph paper, and when it was mostly complete, I constructed this model out of used cardboard boxes to see if it looked like I thought it would in 3D. It mostly did. The roof of the model lifts of so the walls inside can be seen. The 3D model did not include the porches, although they were planned from the beginning. The model has been sitting in the attic since 1982, along with other artifacts, such as this collection of some of the deer antlers we’ve found over the years on our property.