Art Drop #17: Meadow's End

Looking ridiculous in the pursuit of an artistic idea.

Our latest art drop is a collaborative effort that incorporates two sources of inspiration; our meadow and the construction of our home in the Berkshires, MA. Both of these are evolving rapidly, or to be more accurate, fading away. In the meadow, the burst of yellow from the goldenrod has now almost disappeared entirely. Only a hint of it remains, and the clusters of pale purple and white asters are now the headline act – summer’s swan song if you will. But the seasons are a-changin’ and this meadow will soon be mowed, so taking inspiration from it for our work feels urgent while it still has something to offer.

Co-Opting Painter’s Plastic

The construction here is essentially done, but like a gift that keeps on giving it presented some ideas that we are taking forwards. In our post from April titled Under Construction, we included some of my blue minimalist photographs of our windows.

Photographs by Tom Bland.

The magical stuff that was covering them is called painter’s plastic and is taped against walls or windows to protect them during painting. It brings a diffused, dreamlike quality to whatever is behind it, and in the right lighting conditions it can be quite beautiful. Inevitably, ever since I saw what it was capable of back in the spring it has been on my mind as a potential creative tool. What would it look like with a figure behind it? Or a beach? Or… some plants in the meadow? You can probably guess where this is going now.

Trial and Error

To achieve what we had in mind some new skills were required and luckily Jake (the master carpenter who worked on our house) was still around working on the punch list. Diana got expert instruction on how to make a sturdy frame using some scrap wood leftover from construction.

She then taped the painter’s plastic to the finished frame and we took it into the meadow for some test shots.

We soon realized that we needed to construct a way of blocking the light from hitting the screen itself. This wasn’t intended to be a celebration of plastic and the sunlight was illuminating it too much for my liking. We enlisted the help of IKEA and commandeered some of our couch packaging that our daughter had used for an art project, since abandoned (supposedly). After cutting a hole in the box, we taped the frame in place and attached a blanket to the top – the idea being I would have Aunty Dil’s blanket draped over me to block the light, like operating a large format camera with a dark cloth. Sure enough, it looked ridiculous.

My great-aunt, Aunty Dilys, gave us this fleece blanket in 2009. We take it everywhere and always refer to it as Aunty Dil’s blanket. She passed in 2023, but the blanket she gave us is indestructible and we cherish it.

But it worked, mostly. New challenges arose though. Gnats would get inside the box, drawn to the screen and its lightbox effect. Under the blanket with the early autumn sun beating down, temperatures rose within, along with my frustration levels when the composition I wanted eluded me. Later, as expected, when our daughter saw what we were doing there were cries of Hey that’s my box, what have you done to it? But then I took it inside and it became the setting for a game¹ with Magna-Tiles and animals. Crisis averted.

Art Drop #17

For a first attempt at working with painter’s plastic I think we can be happy with what we achieved here. The forms of the goldenrod are preserved along with the softer hues of the meadow this time of year, including the emergence of autumn. I would definitely like to iterate further on this concept of a diffusion box and experiment with not only the opacity of the screen, but scale too. How big can we take this?

Diffused Goldenrod
West Stockbridge, MA, USA
by Tom Bland

Prints of this photograph are only available until October 7, 2024 with no further production of this work for at least a year, at which point it may be added to our permanent collection. To learn more about the paper, sizes, and pricing click the button below to visit the art drop page on our website.

Print of 'Diffused Goldenrod'.

Thank you for reading. In our next newsletter we’ll share some recent as-yet unseen photographs from the meadow, and talk about some sections we will be adding to this newsletter.

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