"Darkstorm Overlook" #TomOgburn from the edge of post-minimalism. To be honest I'm so tired I forgot to post the Spectacular Sundays #Stunday and #EastCoastKin so here we all are in he Re-Post Mode of Being! #digitalcollage
#altphotography #DigitalCompositeImage #DigitalMinimalism
#HiBluesky
"This time, a monumental feature on the landscape, occluded. I think this series just got it's name, as they are all occlusions by the time I'm done with them." In my family, visual occlusion has been a fairly common thing for many of us to contend with, sooner or later. I was recording my grandmother one year, asking her about family history. She mentioned her eyesight. We entered a conversation in which I asked her to describe what she saw, colors & all. I found a short transcription in a file folder one day years later & made some notes, also using some pastels to try to render it. In time I began experimenting on Photoshop with the layers tool, which eventually led me into a realm of creating from images overlap upon others, textures and planes of colors. The scene was an overlook where some fairly tall grass had turned a deep golden tan, which seemed odd enough. But the great gray-black vertical cloud formation was heightening all the colors. In the original photo the sky is a pale washed-out blue, then the strong grays, the odd ochre grass cover blowing in the wind, with the faded asphalt king rather ungainly in the foreground. "Darkstorm Overlook," from mid-September, 2019 on the upper part of the Blue Ridge Parkway. A huge vertical wall of a dark cloud formation had loomed above a great granite cliff wall underneath it. It didn't turn out well as a standalone photograph so it was shelved until I saw it in a file folder a few months back. I was looking for images suitable for "occlusion-training," something I’ve really become taken by lately. It’s becoming kind of a multi-color field minimalist technique for me. Being a painter, I keep applying painterly processes within this mode of digital art-making, primarily additive/reductive, along with emulating traditional underpainting, glazing & scumbling methodologies. Really—it’s intriguing.
"This time, a monumental feature on the landscape, occluded. I think this series just got it's name, as they're all #occlusions." From 2019 on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
"Darkstorm Overlook" from the edge of post-minimalism
#TomOgburn #Stunday #EastCoastKin #DigitalCompositeImage #DigitalMinimalism
While I'm not absolutely, resolutely sure that this one was in west Texas, I’m totally certain that I thought it was at the time I made it as it took me 21 days to get to central Tejas. Which is a smidgen of a fabrication as I channel Mark Twain at 2:40am & I've crossed the breadth of Texas one too many times in my travels. That one's fact checkable! Now, to actually state it as a reality factor before I was moved to wax eloquent on the geography of Texas—I think I may have still been in east New Mexico here, which looked to be a ghost town of old boxcars, roughly cobbled together homes & a small selection of automobiles. The ground was soggy as I had driven through three hours of rain (an argument for it to possibly be west Texas again) & I ate a picnic lunch in this abandoned village, which was 18 miles off the state road I was traveling East on that day. I was enamored by the overlapping entropy of the place & will be able to mine around 20 'America: Lost & Found' works from it over the years to come. The rains had throughly soaked the ground, so much so that parched topsoil was harboring mud puddles. The juxtaposition of old & new windmills, the oil tank & wooden railroad-style water tank, clothes lines with old braided wire stringers so rusted they crumbled into iron dust allowed me to guess I was in an area circa 1890-1900 at least. The yellow railcar on the left is a late 1940’s-early 1950's vintage multi-use steel car. The bricks were holding up well, although freezes had crumble them a bit. The bases of the new wind turbines were incredible to shoot. I was there walking about, shooting little microscapes at my feet, while feeling odd presences. The gargantuan nuts & bolts defy transmission of scale to the viewer in printed form. I imagined I was in a haunted village of migrant farmers, railroad workers & possibly field hands. Adding in the low-throbbing bass of the slow-turning turbine blades ranks this terrain as some of the eeriest I’ve ever visited.
“Wind Power Dead or Alive,” #TomOgburn
#EastCoastKin 🦋 #BlueSkyArtShow Theme is #Abandoned
#landscape #photography #digitalcompositeimage
This image was made from three separate images at three different regions of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The five photographs were made between 1933-1939. They show burn-overs, strip-logging, landslides, pulverized tree remnants and one small living spruce.These images of desolation are a beginning of something grand, much like the burned nest of the mythic Phoenix rising from its predecessor's ashes. For by 1955 these scarred lands were viewed with awe by families lured to the two parks and parkways joining them to each other. One could visit the Smokies, then drive on an unbroken ribbon overlooking greenery the entire way, all the way to the Shenandoah. “Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.” ≈ Janet Fitch This image most likely will have a few more supporting smaller images embedded into it before it’s done. Like most all of the Digital Hybrids I’m making, it begins with digital builds, and will weave into and weld with collage, printmaking, painting and at times in the end, with assemblage. The scale of the art will vary until the final larger pieces cap off that work sequence within the arc of making the final large pinnacle artworks. Something akin to that idea? In my lifetime, I have seen these changes, in the longest, slowest-of-motion march forward as the mind might imagine when willing to slow itself down to around three frames per minute, or the evidence of photographs made by tourists documenting the travels and places where they, for a moment, experienced their own sense of Time, perhaps even their own winters of spirit in retrospect if they had grown up in these regions.
"Roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they are inside you." ≈ Isabel Allende
"Until the landslide comes" #DigitalCompositeImage
#Photography #EastCoastKin #TomOgburn
#TheParkwaysProjects A multi-tiered photo essay to come in 3 arenas—a Substack/Patreon/Bluesky trio 🧵⬇️
"You don't take a photograph, you make it." ≈ Ansel Adams And he meant that, in a few more ways than one. Here, precariously stands a tree I photographed in 2018. "It" is "They" actually, for its two trees joined at the base, truly sharing osmosis between them. One was cypress, that I knew. The other was a very different kind of tree & also ... at the crowns of both, mistletoe had taken hold by some fluke loong, long ago. I was there again in 2024. I walked down to the shoreline, knowing it was likely gone. It was. I've learned now the old dock's being removed. Everything in this scene then, subject-wise, is gone. The sky is gray, end of day, with a hint of hazed blue at top. The water's golden, long grass golden & fallen over at the trees bases. There's a large trunk which is bent underneath the remaining earthen bank, curving slightly upward then plunging back into the water, all earth which once surrounded it eroded away long ago. This scene is a study in entropy & for that reason is in my top five favorite works in "The America: Lost & Found" series. From my notes: "One night, a few months back in the early fall when the waters were down on Lake Marion, I was walking by its north shore and saw a ghost. On viewing it, I began to hear whispers of old arguments told by one of the voices closest to me for so many years. A very old waterlogged and siltified tree trunk, smooth and very gelatinous, almost like a giant dead salamander having lain on the bank for too many days, was beating between the piers of an old dock stretched out into the waters of the lake. On either end of that log were deep grooves worn into its circumference, old and slick as well, from the chains or cables which evidently had held it in place for far too long." That describes what are called "ghost trees"—those which, at the end of the land clearing project my grandfather was one of the supervisors for between 1936-1940, had to be staked down.They had crashed the timber market.
“Twin sisters of different mothers” #TomOgburn #Art
#Stunday 🦋 #Landscapes#Photography #DigitalArt
#BlueskyPhotography #Skyart #BlueskyArt #Nature
#LakeMarion #Santee #SouthCarolina #Waterscapes
#TheParkwaysProjects #DigitalCompositeImage
A shadowform of a large black crow flies across a surreal landscape of old photographs, a woman in a flapper dress, circa 1927 holding a chicken; two young men standing in front of a brand new 1950 Studebaker, trees and bathers in a South Carolina lake in the late 1940's. The colors are all golden tans, ocher tans, dark walnut browns, and light oranges. The tone of the artwork, a collage, is somber. We are no longer in the age of our innocence, but that of depradation. "You walk and talk and move around in circles Your friends telling you you are doing fine You can't see that snowball as it hurtles Through the shattered membranes of your mind If I could talk to you for just one minute Then you would know what it is I am getting at But there again your head's got nothing in it By the way you left without your hat I'm walking in the wind looking at the sky Hanging on a breeze and wondering why, why Your old man's headed for the final pay-off The joker that you got is fading too And all the sharks that come around for the rip-off Are gonna tear the flesh right off you The plastic princess hangs her head in wonder at the silver glittered boys Trying, trying to compete And all at once the room begins to thunder And all that's left is the stain on the sheet The prostitute is standing on the corner Suffering so much pain to stay alive She's so real, that life itself bows down before her She couldn't make that nine to five While the president is crying, crying in the White House The prime minister's really got the blues All the heads of state are busy playing cat & mouse 'Cause you can see none of them have ever paid their dues God knows why, why, why..." ≈ Jim Capaldi & Steve Winwood, from Traffic (1974)
“As the crow flies through Time's needles” #TomOgburn
#Stunday 🦋 #Landscapes #BlueskyPhotography #Art
#Skyart #BlueskyArt #DigitalArt #ImageTransfer
#Collage #Uncollage #DigitalCompositeImage
#Crows #Surreality #FluidCollage #SouthernGothic
#Nature #TheParkwaysProjects #Photography
Thanks Robyn 💙🌙 This work is one of my 'America: Lost & Found' series #digitalcompositeimage builds.
They are essentially really deeply layered digital paintings, using Photoshop to allow me to "glaze, and use washes and scumbles on them," in a way. They're a lot of work, but I love building them🎍🏵️
GTT (Snow Mtn Ranch 1979) #digitalcompositeimage
"Gone to Texas." It was a commonplace sign on many homes, scrawled on their doors in 1865-68.
But here, it tells the story of a friend who disappeared overnight to a bleak morning Sun. A true monotone.
#BlueSkyArtShow Theme #photography #Monochrome
We lived in a quiet world once. This photograph was made on the porch of friends, their beautiful red Taos dog sunning just out of the frame. Two of the most contemplative spirits I've ever known. A woman, a man, content, at home, with purpose. With conviction of self, of place, of role. A couple, content inside the years of their belonging. Flagstones beneath their feet, warm to the touch of sunlight on their soles just minutes before the shadows fell. She framed in the sunlight still, he in the shadow, save for both their feet, in the warmth of that self-same sun. I've not seen nor heard from them in years. Nor they me. Our spirits, as writers, as polymaths, as artists shifted one too many times yet theirs' are personalities which upon seeing each other again would begin where we left off on that split sun and shadowed porch on that pitch-perfect day.
"Sobol Porch,” #DigitalCompositeImage from the
#VirtualPalladium series of works. #TaosNM #SantaFeNM #Bluesky #BlueSkyArt #Art #Nature #PortraitPhotography #HomePhotography #DigitalArt #PostModernistArt
#HighDesert #NewMexico #ArtistsPortraits
You are viewing a surreal, dreamlike image, a woman is contemplating, deep in thought. She's surrounded in a miasma of undulating patterns, weavings of the mind, as a shaman's visions may appear. The skull of a raven features prominently on the right side of the image, but is not situated so as to reveal its place in reference to the woman. "The ghosts of ravens' memories promenade in our dreams," from the Digital Hybrids works. Original model photo made in my Charleston Beaufain Street studio in 2003. Digital composite image 2021/2022, Copyright 2025 Tom Ogburn. In the lowcountry of South Carolina, Nature has produced another finely distributed bane, largely born on the wind as well, but not as noticeable as the visible fine dust driven by the Western winds, like small singularities of dust storms arising in strong gusts. It's called black mold. It seems to be carried by the softer prevailing salt marsh currents which are slower, but just as effective in spreading the airborne contaminants over Time. Again, Time, and Entropy. Two constants, second only to Change. "We press on, no matter the weight." ≈ TR Ritchie a digital hybrid series
"The ghosts of ravens' memories promenade in our dreams” #TomOgburn #Art #Stunday 🦋 #EastCoastKin #EtherealArt
#DigitalHybrid #Mindscape #Surrealism #Photography #DigitalArt #BlueskyArt #DigitalSurrealism #Postmodern #DigitalCompositeImage #Skyart #BlueskyPhotography
Sep 26 2000 SC Arts Commission Grant Year One of Two. I was photographing back & forth from the Southeast to the American Southwest. The series title? "South by Southwest." A series which ran from 1996 through 2007, after 11 years, it morphed into "Roadscapes," which began to lead into a new paradigm shift, having to do with tech & time. Old tech, modern time, with a twist of irony. A enticing cocktail of photographic portions. Out of that grew early stages of old, archaic photo-tech emulations, which led to Autochromes. I can remember the autochromes I saw in old magazines in a next-door neighbor's home, my 3rd grade teacher (Mrs. Mamie Gantt) who collected old historic publications. The colors were somehow far more lucid than any of the modern 1960's publications. I was not to learn why until 2011. Her collection, which populated 2/3 of their spacious climate-controlled basement next door, was disposed of by a family member by hauling it off to the landfill 7 miles outside of Kershaw. My father told me of the day he saw them piling the magazines into a trailer. They allowed him to take a handful. He chose the 1940's era LIFE magazines. Mostly black & white. I sat with him & listened to his memories flood from the photographs in LIFE. I watched his eyes glisten & had to smile with him. It was the last touch I had with Mrs. Gantt's wondrous color photo magazines from 1905-1935. Such are the vagaries of Time & our perceptions of our role within it. To this day I'm enamored with autochromes. Since 2011 I've traced their imagery under Lupes & wondered at the near fluid blending of colors. By 1942, this technology had almost died. To this day, no one, to the best of my knowledge, has successfully replicated it. Not beyond that which I've tried myself. Yet, all my efforts are imbedded with Photoshop, which is only emulation. I've yet to learn of another person who is working with cornstarch dyed & stacked frames of 6-11 panes of glass to create a projected image.
The Autochrome Lost to Time.
“Askew” #TomOgburn #DigitalPhoto #America:Lost&Found
#Stunday 🦋 #EastCoastKin #Landscape #Photography
#BlueskyPhotography #Skyart #BlueskyArt #DigitalArt
#Art #DigitalCompositeImage #PagosaSpringsCO
To see my mutlimedia work: @bardicarts.bsky.social
#EastCoastKin🦋#BlueSkyArtShow Theme is #Reflections #TomOgburn #digitalcompositeimage #digitalart #skyart
#landscape #photography #art #landscapephotography #photographersofbluesky #blueskyphotography #blueskyart
#EastCoastKin🦋#BlueSkyArtShow Theme is #Reflections #TomOgburn #digitalcompositeimage #digitalart #skyart
#landscape #photography #art #landscapephotography #photographersofbluesky #blueskyphotography #blueskyart
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#landscape #photography #art #landscapephotography #photographersofbluesky #blueskyphotography #blueskyart
#EastCoastKin🦋#BlueSkyArtShow Theme is #Reflections #TomOgburn #digitalcompositeimage #digitalart #skyart
#landscape #photography #art #landscapephotography #photographersofbluesky #blueskyphotography #blueskyart
#EastCoastKin🦋#BlueSkyArtShow Theme is #Reflections #TomOgburn #digitalcompositeimage #digitalart #skyart
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#EastCoastKin🦋#BlueSkyArtShow Theme is #Reflections #TomOgburn #digitalcompositeimage #digitalart #skyart
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#EastCoastKin🦋#BlueSkyArtShow Theme is #Reflections #TomOgburn #digitalcompositeimage #digitalart #skyart
#landscape #photography #art #landscapephotography #photographersofbluesky #blueskyphotography #blueskyart
#EastCoastKin🦋#BlueSkyArtShow Theme is #Reflections #TomOgburn #digitalcompositeimage #digitalart #skyart
#landscape #photography #art #landscapephotography #photographersofbluesky #blueskyphotography #blueskyart
#EastCoastKin🦋#BlueSkyArtShow Theme is #Reflections #TomOgburn #digitalcompositeimage #digitalart #skyart
#landscape #photography #art #landscapephotography #photographersofbluesky #blueskyphotography #blueskyart
#EastCoastKin🦋#BlueSkyArtShow Theme is #Reflections #TomOgburn #digitalcompositeimage #digitalart #skyart
#landscape #photography #art #landscapephotography #photographersofbluesky #blueskyphotography #blueskyart
#EastCoastKin🦋#BlueSkyArtShow Theme is #Reflections #TomOgburn #digitalcompositeimage #digitalart #skyart
#landscape #photography #art #landscapephotography #photographersofbluesky #blueskyphotography #blueskyart
#EastCoastKin🦋#BlueSkyArtShow Theme is #Reflections #TomOgburn #digitalcompositeimage #digitalart #skyart
#landscape #photography #art #landscapephotography #photographersofbluesky #blueskyphotography #blueskyart
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#landscape #photography #art #landscapephotography #photographersofbluesky #blueskyphotography #blueskyart
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#EastCoastKin🦋#BlueSkyArtShow Theme is #Reflections #TomOgburn #digitalcompositeimage #digitalart #skyart
#landscape #photography #art #landscapephotography #photographersofbluesky #blueskyphotography #blueskyart
It's the reflective inlay! 🌙
