The Hideaway (Driftwood #3)
Buffalo Bill State Park, Wyoming
2024

A driftwood shelter built against a rather large boulder.

I’m happy to be among the 35 artists whose work was selected for this exhibit. We were able to stop by and enjoy the exhibit a couple of weeks ago. It’s a really nice collection of images professionally displayed in a pleasant setting in a pleasant location.

Totem (Driftwood #2)
Buffalo Bill State Park, Wyoming
2024

A smooth stub of driftwood sporting an interesting worm-carved “petroglyph”. (As far as I know the artist worm was no relation to RFK Jr.’s brain worm. But then you never know)

Wooden Fish (Driftwood #1)
Buffalo Bill State Park, Wyoming
2024

I’ll have more of the Home Ground series soon, but wanted to present a set of images involving driftwood that I came across at the slightly drained Buffalo Bill Reservoir outside of Cody, Wyoming where we had stopped for the night on our way home a couple of weeks ago. The weather was hot and filled with forest fire smoke so I spent little time outside our campervan. But I did take a short walk along the shoreline where a lot of interesting driftwood has washed up over the years.

Home Ground #10
Bozeman, Montana
2024

The Fashion Queen claims I have all the artistic talent in the family. But I know that to not be true, as evidenced by the scratch board drawing of four trees in this photo. She created it (and a couple of others I’ve seen) at a quite young age (teens or 20s). I think they are quite good and if she’d had more interest in it and kept working on her drawing skills I’m sure she would have become quite an accomplished artist in her own right. Alas, other interests dominated her time.

Also on the dresser are the only Ken Follet books either I have ever read. It’s his Pillars of the Earth series, a quite good historical fiction account centered around the building of cathedrals in medieval Europe. It was eventually made into a limited series TV show, also quite good.

Home Ground #9
Bozeman, Montana
2024

The photos I’ve taken for this series so far have been as I found the scenes in our house, with no rearranging of objects other than some minimal housekeeping to make the composition cleaner. In this case however I picked up Morris’s book, Time Pieces, from the other end of the dresser and placed it under the lamp as an homage to the photographer who inspired this work. (I know I also have a copy of his book The Home Place which provided the most inspiration for this project, but it wasn’t sitting around like this one was so I went with what was handy.)

Home Ground #8
Bozeman, Montana
2024

Home Ground #7
Bozeman, Montana
2024

Miscellaneous art work and other items on display on our stairway. If you are a fan of my crow and raven photographs, you might be interested to know that it was that crow photograph on the wall that started it all for me, in that it was the first crow photo I ever took. It’s called Wet Ride and features a soggy wet crow perched on the handlebars of a bicycle on the narrow streets of Gamla stan, the historic old town in Stockholm, Sweden. It was a just a quick photograph in a chance encounter but I liked it enough that I was motivated to go out and photograph other crows and ravens.

Home Ground #6
Bozeman, Montana
2024

Home Ground #5
Bozeman, Montana
2024

Part of the Fashion Queen’s shoe collection sitting in front of a cherry wood framed full-length mirror I made for her for Christmas in 1981 in Alaska where we first met.