I am headed back to Iceland in about a week. This time to teach. Last time was as an artist in residence at the Baer Art Center in Hofsos in 2013. We will be at the Art Center for the class.

My time in Iceland was just as special, magical and wonderful as you would expect. It was a transformative experience in that it shifted my sense of the landscape and how to photograph it. Because it is such a "scrubbed clean" country with few trees, objects, scale and content float in the space of the picture differently. My New England-based sense of scale was skewed by tremendous clarity at great distances. In fact, my first two days at the residency, I shut down, didn't photograph and wrestled with just what it was that I could do while there.

This is an aerial of where I lived for 5 weeks in 2013, one of five artists, each with our own studio, our meals prepared by a chef, with frequent trips into town or on day trips to different places. 

Behind the main house you can see the long building where we lived with the large barn-like annex to the right where we often met, projected slides of our work and had our end of the residency open house and reception. 

I have longed to return to this place since leaving in 2013 and here I am going back. I will work to assess my students' level and their proclivities in our early sessions and then address the manner for their improvement. We will take field trips and a morning for the now famous "boat ride" that takes us around the cliff face on the left side of the Cape (seen in the top photograph) where this is:

This is what it looks like from the air:

One magnificent hunk of rock.

My students will work towards a final body of photographs for the class and then return home with RTP (ready to print) files. I will teach with Mercedes Jelinek, my teaching assistant at Penland for three summers. She will be along to assist but also to head sessions on portraiture and perhaps lighting as well. 

After the week of teaching, I am off in a rented car to drive the ring road for a week before flying home.

I will post from Iceland while there. 

Back to Iceland! I can't believe my good fortune.