"Usually it would be at end of day, twilight. Then, the gloaming. I’d go out there to sit with her often, until even the lavender & purple light left by the Sun, I would guess, as a child would, waned away."🌙
#MagicalRealism #Ghoststories #Story #DigitalArt
#Opossums #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn
South Carolina's Huntington Beach State Park!
#SouthCarolina #HuntingtonBeachStatePark #SCPRT
#TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #NationalParkService
#NPS #AtlanticOcean #TheGrandStrand
🦉 Here's what I'm doing over on #TheParkwaysProjects on #Substack —when not writing a grant (scary stuff that) & really trying to bring a long, nine-year struggle to an end so I can get back to my art, #Bluesky🦋 and all my friends within.
Here's hoping I get to write & post in here again by May! 🍻
Many thanks to all who are staying with me & new followers. I've had to put 70% of my time in trying to finally settle a long estate dilemma & sell our properties while also trying to build 'The Parkways Projects' Substack site. 🦉🪔🌙 Here's a link:
#TheParkwaysProjects
This is the latest attempt by me in Photoshop to recover the finer details and lose the really shudder-worthy digital artifacting that seems to be at the root of all of Thioller's images present online. 🦉✨
#FelixThioller #TheHorseTrainer #TheParkwaysProjects
#ClassicPhotography #Photography ⬇️🥂
🦉 Ditto That—The intro part
#theparkwaysprojects #ChestnutTrees #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #TheSixties #TheGreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #EastCoasKin
"Progress however, like art, is in the eye of the beholders. Concert stems from such vision, and vision stirs the mind and heart." 🌙 🪔
🦉🪔🍂The final feed, with intro, which technically speaking, should have arrived first on the scene.
#theparkwaysprojects #ChestnutTrees #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #TomOgburn #TheSixties #1960s #TheGreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark
🦉 I'm almost ready to apply for a few things over here at #TheParkwaysProjects Thanks Y'all! 🪔
✨And still writing up a storm. Here's a WIP entry with a couple of stories embedded. A choice of Fire or Rain.
#EastCoastKin #ArtYear #BlueRidgeParkway #NationalParks
#Photography #Landscape #Mountains
🦉"The Seven Vacations (of nine tales) #TheParkwaysProjects
#TomOgburn #TheBlueRidgeParkway #Appalachians 🪔
An introduction of a place, a family, and a once turbulent Time called "The 1960's." #Photograph by me at age 12, 2nd #Photo by my father. #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #BlueSky🦋
🦉"Recede" #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #Photography
"Looking up is a major occupation in Jerome. There are things above you that otherwise, you would just never have a sighting by looking straight ahead."🌙
#Landscape #MountainMonday #DigitalCollage #JeromeAZ #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #BlueSky
"After the Deluge" It's the small things...
#photography #nature #storms 🦉
"You move away from storms as an invite for them to find you"
#Stunday #ArtYear #EastCoastKin
#TomOgburn #TheParkwaysProjects
🌙 "After the Deluge" #photography #nature #storms 🦉
"You move away from storms as an invite for them to find you"
#Stunday #ArtYear #EastCoastKin
#TomOgburn #TheParkwaysProjects
A Deep Dive into Art & Walking Tour of #TheParkwaysProjects
🌙🦉
#ArtYear #dreams #landscape #photography #ghosts #memory #surreal #postmodern #digitalart #writing #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #EastCoastKin #microfiction #southerngothic #writer #GreatSmokyMountainsNP #ShenandoahNationalPark
It was hard to make a decision whether to post this one on #TheParkwaysProjects or my BardicArts Substack. In the end, she loved the mountains as much I ever have, but with less chances to be there. She deserves a place in the Parkways Projects.
#EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Ghosts #Spirits #DigitalArt
🌙🦉🪔 "This film is the heart & soul of 1981, extruded from the dawn of Reagan—the original summarily curbed as nominal. A music video to MTV's legacy after the long and dark night of it's decline to follow." ≈ #TomOgburn
#ArtYear #EastCoastKin #Music #MTV #MTVAnniversary
#TheParkwaysProjects #Memory
Tributaries at Poinsett State Park #TheParkwaysProjects
A location which is day by day becoming a bit closer to the present day waves on the Atlantic shoreline, its once and future home. 🌙🦉🪔
#Nature #Photography #History #ArtsYear #EastCoastKin
#SouthCarolina #PoinsettStatePark
🦉 It is hard for me to not write of my own arguments with my parents when I sit down to try to describe the 1960’s. The 1970’s, and above all, those frail years of the 1980’s 🌙
#TheParkwaysProjects #Photography #ArtYear #BlueRidgeParkway #EastCoastKin
In time, we all become above the fray.
🌙 The Tables of Craggy Gardens & Advent of Cumberland Knob 1966.
#TheParkwaysProjects #Change #Landscape #Photography
#NationalParks #Nature #ArtYear #BlueRidgeParkway #NorthCarolina #SouthCarolina #GreatSmokyMountains
"Ninety-nine percent of Wisdom is Being Wise in Time"🦉 #TheodoreRoosevelt
A timeless square shot, of a bridge crossing the Little Pee Dee River in northeastern-most South Carolina. The day is still, white clouds calmly abiding ahead of blue sky. The blackwater mirrors darkly the sky above. Still water, currents only underneath, carrying secrets within its deeper recesses. The underside of this bridge is mirrored, casting a near-black shadow. It seems suspended through ebony reversal. To read the full story: https://theparkwaysprojects.substack.com/p/a-bridge-too-far Just over a year ago, I began to wander my Jeep into the deep Carolina Bays region of the two states as part of 'The Parkways Projects.' Where the two states conjoin. It is not a place of ease, no matter your constitution nor your mindset. It’s an eerie place of separatist belonging, for I felt I belonged there by birthright but was excluded by today's currents. In these Carolina Bays, it is the crows which sound the back and forth of present participles versus past tense. These murders of crows were out in abundance on this trip into the swamp basins of the Carolina Bays crossings between Little Pee Dee State Park (South Carolina) and one of the newest North Carolina State Parks, Lumber River. It's an old bridge but with a new and shiny guard rail assembly. Nothing like an allegory there, for we are not about that, no, especially not in Carolina Bay territory. Lumbees. Witches. Panthers—or paints. Others. Neithers. Amalgams from the in-betweens. Dark, light, good, evil, all exist within these swamps. Along with the fish curiously trying to consider the humans above the surface of their waters. I walked this bridge four times, shooting each time something caught my eye. There’s no stopping the sounds, the caws, the currents and eddies, the blackwater abundance in shallow layers hiding just what we do not wish to know is under there. But things which the hackles tell us are under there. Like today. Then I made my way into the swamp to shoot it from this vantage point.
🦉 A Bridge Too Far #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #Photography #Landscape #ArtYear #EastCoastKin
#BlueSkyArtShow #Smooth #Nature
An old bridge, but with a new & shiny guard rail assembly. Nothing like an allegory there, for we are not about that, no, especially not in Carolina Bay territory 🌙
🌙 A Bridge Too Far ≈ Between the Conjunction of South Carolina & North Carolina Swamps
#TheParkwaysProjects #Change #Landscape #Photography
#NationalParks #Nature #ArtYear #CarolinaBays #NorthCarolina #SouthCarolina #Swamps
"Ninety-nine percent of Wisdom is Being Wise in Time"🦉 #TheodoreRoosevelt
🌙 The starting point of words & images🪔
#TheParkwaysProjects #Change #Landscape #Photography
#VintagePhotographs #NationalParks #AltNationalParks
#Nature #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #ArtYear
#GreatSmokyMountains #ShenandoahNationalPark
"99% of Wisdom is Being Wise in Time"🦉 #TRoosevelt
I'm finally beginning to get a groove going on #Substack with #TheParkwaysProjects — if any of you are there too, please drop by for a read and visit ✨
I've been writing up a storm, many of them expanded, and a times contracted from 1st and 2nd Drafts of ideas I've been squirreling away.
#TheParkwaysProjects
#Landscapes #Photography #Nature
#BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway
#NationalParks #GreatSmokyMountains #Shenandoah
#EastCoastKin #ArtYear #AltNationalParks #NationalParks
2️⃣ It covers what I'm about to start doing, where I hope to go, some infrastructure of #TheParkwaysProjects 🌝
I hope a lot of y'all will pop over to read it. I now have 16 rough drafts, 16 works of art or clusters of the same, Words & perhaps this weekend to post a couple more.
⬇️
Here is the interior of a very small stone cabin crafted by young men in training as members of the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930's. It is a very skilled build, with both the greyish-golden native stone and the deep reddish browns of old wooden rafters, beams and planks hand cut and crafted, the wood probably made of spruce. It's a beautiful remnant of an era fading from view in many parts of America. An old vintage mountain rescue sled, made of steel and oak, hangs horizontally, high above the floor. This is a room steeped in lore. It is in this place of being we may find our anchor beneath the waters which might drown us should we spill over into the deep. We are witnessing the Sun's existence. Between two chairs. I can only consider, what was that difference between the origin of these chairs? One a standard ladderback, the other created by an artisan crafter plying a skilled sense of local aesthetic. Both were most likely crafted by mountain hands. It's of no matter, really, save for just igniting wonder in the mind of the viewer as the entire building, exterior and interior, stem from the old ways. They derive from the past the skills the people of Appalachia knew, and carried in their being all through the course of their lives. That chair on the left, made by hands long ago buried in a grave marked by their surviving family members in hopes that their descendants would remember them. Such is the care some are willing to devote to places where we as visitors might go to reconnoiter, to reclaim our sense of self. It is a certain clarity which has been bequeathed to us by a living being, a young mind who wishes to share an interpretation of just what might have been, oh so long ago. A mighty vote of thanks to Ranger Josh Powell at Big Ridge, for your efforts to maintain, curate and equip this small but well-preserved slice of history.
#Photography #TheParkwaysProjects
#EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Nature #scape
The interior of the original Rangers' Cabin Office at Big Ridge State Park, Tennessee.
Never let it be said that the love of a person for what they believe in can not transcend the most grievous of barriers.
🧵 ⬇️4ALT below...
Ranger Josh Powell is a unique person. He has a vision. He has a grasp of the past. You are viewing his art, his vision, both into the Past and onto our Futures in these lean years to come. We are born from memories, all of us. Some of us know from where our memories come; we are the lucky ones, for we have a heritage of words from those who came before us. Josh has prepared this cabin, which rests to this day in the same place it always resided, at the entry to Big Ridge State park in Tennessee. The only anomalies are due to the vagaries of time, for they are brochures, maps and promotionals from years past, angling up from the depths of their own history, and they are then perfectly placed for all to see, to feel, to observe. We are witnessing Time's passage. There is power in this little cabin. In this little cabin resides love for one's profession, and for all those whose professions preceded you. Look closely at the lay of these stones. Realize they stem from the tired fingers and sore forearms of 20 year old men soon to be called to service on December 8th, 1941. You are standing upon history. You are hovering above souls long buried. You are in a finger's grasp of knowing those who came before you and gave their lives for the freedoms you once had.
#Stunday #Photography #Nature #TheParkwaysProjects
The interior of the Rangers' Cabin Office at Big Ridge State Park, Tennessee, scene #1.
Never let it be said that the love of a person for what they believe in can not transcend the most grievous of barriers.
There is a wall, I presume it is still standing in Seattle. I struggle still to this day to remember which bridge it was; more a viaduct structure, a wall made beautiful by human hands who has clearly evidenced by their touch so many years go the love they held for their craft. This bridge, this abutment, this wall was a place she chose to have her photographs made that year for her first solo album, which would be a CD, not an LP. There was a huge tree across from it that she leaned against as I photographed her, in a simple sheer black dress & leather boots. She laughed & the sky listened. We had gone to the tree first, for this was her first idea. I kept looking at this wall. When done we walked to the wall & I shot a sequence of her looking directly into the lens, then to the left, to the right. I loved her profile. We'd joked & tossed around ideas for the World to come in the next few years. This was 1988 & 89. I'd flown out on tickets bumped on each trip back to Seattle from South Carolina, always scheduling my trips alongside holidays so that I could volunteer my seat to those who had family to see, dates to make. On one 3 week trip, I landed 9 cross country flights from Charlotte NC to Seattle WA. And in this way we began our friendship, me with a place I could crash at anytime when in Seattle, on Whitman. Her with a wish to just walk, talk & listen, to swap & exchange ideas & dreams & art. A few years later it suddenly ceased. Every 100 years it awakens & allows an entrance. Only of you love someone dearly are you allowed to stay, for if one person leaves, then all would dissipate. Brigadoon. "Just off I-25 is an exit to Rowe and Pecos. Rowe seems to me a high desert Brigadoon. There is age there; there is living in an amorphous act of Time." "So I stayed a third night, considering that this town hidden in sort if a high vale alongside the Arkansas River was beginning to feel as though I'd wandered into Brigadoon in the Rockies."
You saw Brigadoon #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #Photography #Landscape #Minimalism #ArtYear #EastCoastKin
1989 in Seattle—shooting an album cover, when I saw this incredible bridge wall across from us. Shot with an old Minolta, my negative today is lean.
You saw the Whole of the Moon 💙🦉🌙
4️⃣ALT⬇️
Ahhh, South Carolina. Exhales. Here indeed is a very vibrant sunset cascading across Interstate 95 at that perfect point just in between New York City, New York and Miami, Florida. The 2.4 mile long causeway is a source of constant traffic twenty-four seven, 365 days a year. Imagine that. Except around mealtimes. There is a brilliant orange-gold sunset lying flat, just above the two and one half-mile causeway, casting its dying breath of light upwards while issuing a deafening deep blue roar downwards to the waters' surface. In just three minutes, all will be dark save for the headlights of travelers. Lake Marion, a lake my Grandfather helped build for six years far below the levels of these waters today, sprawls across a low horizon, the deep midnight blue sky pressing down upon the last glower of the Sun as he drops into darkness just before the gloaming. He already knows he has lost to Nightfall. The Sun is a creature of Habit, as we are to him. I call this a Victorian sunset due to just the abject beauty of it, predating the hubbub of the sounds I heard as I shot this image. Yet quiet enough to qualify as the Victorians did love to glom about and inebriate themselves quietly while watching such events occur. Just 350 miles from here, there will be 20 to 50 hardy Americans sitting in their lawn chairs where the Blue Ridge Parkway meets the Skyline Drive, at one of the finest vistas to the West in America, no matter the season. In the summer, you will not find parking, so, you may as well be traveling south to Miami, crossing his causeway. This is the Victorian view. Just six days before, I shot the postmodernist sunset from this same location, give or take a thousand yards. I'm about to pass that one around 11:15pm, just 25 minutes away from now. A sunset with teeth. I've launched "The Parkways Projects' Substack just last week, a newsletter/blog with various modes of writing and visual art. I hope y'all will visit every so often!
🦉A Victorian sunset #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #Photography #Landscape #ArtYear #EastCoastKin
#BlueSkyArtShow #Vibrant
From Jan 26th 2019, the golden light you see is above Santee State Park, hearkening back to a Colonial era event in which a large earthwork still exists. I'm 1.3 miles away.
"I’m not so certain that certainty even knows how to knock. But I know it glides like an owl in a humid night." ⬇️🦉
≈ Here's my first Substack post. The official start of #TheParkwaysProjects in full writer's mode.
#Photography #Nature #Scape #ForestFriday
#EastCoastKin #ArtYear #TomOgburn
Water laden gray clouds scroll over a pale and overcast silver sky. It had been 50 years since my family had embarked on the third year of traveling up both parkways. In 1969, we were pulling a new Coleman Pop-up camper towed by our aging 1963 Chevrolet Impala, with no air conditioning. That was the reason for the Coleman, for in 1968 we discovered just what brakes could not withstand barreling down the mountain grades with too much weight behind us. During both years, my Mom, who was ostensibly the navigator on such trips, was busy journaling. I'm thankful she wrote in longhand, for she was an excellent shorthand stenographer. That would have been nearly criminal as I doubt I could find a shorthand reader these days. Due to those journals in 1968 and 1969, I was able to follow the exact same route, stop in the same National Park campgrounds, for both Parkways were the first two such National Parks in America, and even in seven cases she wrote down the campsite number as well. I stayed overnight in five of them in August 2019. I do have a thing for ritual, revisiting that which can never really be regained, or even really be understood. But we can try. For the Appalachians were my havens. It was the days when even on faraway junkets, we were allowed to run free, explore thickets of mountain laurel, follow bears, wander about while the parentals were doing siesta time, for after all, the purpose was to do as we all pleased. There's far more to this story, and that's going to be the challenge as it progresses, for I have many folders of shots I never intended to take. Then images I had planned but turned out to become something else, for 50 years is a short time for trees, while a long time for us. The first thing I noticed was the old vistas had often disappeared. Although it's a National scenic parkway and modern practices of allowing the flora to do as Nature intended has resulted in a lot of 40 to 50 year growth at overlooks built between 1933 to 1948.
🦉 Station's Breach #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #Photography #Landscape #Travel #Mountains
#RockinTuesday #ArtYear #EastCoastKin
"Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy - your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. ≈ Annie Leibovitz
⬇️4ALT
