We are in our last week of a month long residency in northern Iceland at the Baer Art Center in Hofsos. The five of us are busy preparing for our Open House, where we will show work done while here to the community. Think: reception for 125 people, drinks and food, art on the walls with one installation piece made out back carved into the concrete pad facing due north. Me? Mine will be a slide show of work made while here that will run as a loop during the two hours of the open house.

What am I showing? Some of these:

made yesterday on a boat trip we took from Hofsos sliding up the coast past Baer and along next to "The Cape", huge walls of a rock cliff that was bizarre, beautiful and and a little terrifying:

I found myself wondering if this really was made in a random event of volcanic eruption as it seemed so ordered, so thought through, such an orchestrated place.

And some of these:

made from the back seat of this, a Piper Super Cub, last week on a rare blue sky day:

where, on the return leg, we flew over:

This last one made from pointing down at a river, made milky from silt carried down from glaciers melting faster after a few warm days.

Is this a complete summary of the work I've done here? Not even close. This post just looks at a couple of the bodies of work I made here. The slide show for the Open House tomorrow is short but even so is 132 photographs. Blogs are great but not a place to show work in depth. I will leave that for the site and for future exhibition.

Trust me: if you care about photographing or just seeing a place that is simply amazing in its variety, its sheer beauty and its extensiveness and would like to do that in the summer when it is cool and pleasant here, Iceland is your place. I have simply been blown away by this land, the warmth of its people, this country that is not over populated and the experience of being allowed to live here for the past month. I have Steinunn to thank as she made it all possible by starting the residencies over five years ago and hosts us here at Baer. She did a remarkable thing and she and her family have my everlasting gratitude.

Note: Apologies for not posting in the past few days. We lost internet service here in Iceland for a few days. We are back up now, obviously, and so I am putting this one out written late last week. 

If you've been following my posts lately you know I have been in Iceland at an artists' residency for all of July. It has taken me what seems like a long time to get to something here. That would be "less".

Ever just sit someplace with a camera, watch things stay the same and also change right in front of you and take a picture from time to time? What do those pictures do, what are they about? Well, partly they are about where you are, what the camera sees of the landscape in front of it. But those pictures are very much about the subtle differences between each frame, how the light modified the subject or something was now in the frame that wasn't before. This characteristic of photographing something thought of as being largely insignificant and prescribing big time importance to it is a thing I care a great deal about but it is truly almost impossible to pull off.  Again, if you've been reading these, I showed that way of working in the post: Simple.

But"less" is different. It is about the realization that photography is a hugely comparative language. That in order for something to look big, for the most part, it will need to be paired with something small, that, in order for something to appear blurry it needs to go with something sharp, and so on. If you want to reduce the frame down to almost nothing, in effect, to put "less" in the frame yes, obviously, you need an area that is blank but then what you put in there and where you put it becomes hugely important. Mahala Magins, the Australian painter I profiled a couple of weeks ago, has been working with that concept while here. She has been painting gray and white and blue rectangles that are almost nothing. Of course, then what happens when you look closely is you find a paint drip, a variation to a line, something about the way she's put a box next to a box and the small becomes huge in importance. This reductive way of seeing lends itself to here in this spare, glacially carved out landscape in Northern Iceland where trees are rare and you can just sit and watch the weather and the time of day completely transform the landscape in front of you. The word that keeps coming to mind for me is "essential". This then can be an almost meditative way of working and has been hugely rewarding for me.

These were taken the other day at about 5 am. You can't really say "dawn" here as it had been light for hours before I made these but the clouds were beginning to clear off after several days of fog.

Say you and I are sitting next to each other in front of this or some landscape like it, some ground and some sky and very little else. And you turn to me and ask, 

What do you do with this? 

My answer would be:

Not much

One of my all time best freinds was Rob Gooblar, who died years ago. We would go on summer-long road trips together in the 70's and 80's, long journeys of thousands of miles with our love for photography in common and a desire for new things to see and new experiences to have. Often when he'd come back from photographing something really wonderful he had one word he would say and it would come out with a lot of breath and conviction, like he'd just been somewhere and he'd seen things.

He would say, 

Whew

Whew!

Finnur, Steinunn's husband, offered to take another resident, Scott Johnson, and myself on an overnight trip to the mountains in the northeast of Iceland. What a place! To say I was unprepared for what we were about to see is an understatement. Having been used to  the acutely minimal landscape where Baer is along the coast we plunged into the interior where the earth is in upheaval, where it smokes and fumes and burps from hot sulphur pools, where recent lava covers the land like a carpet, where there are slices in the ground that wind down to hot water pools,  where sheep roam free to pasture in the mountains and where most places off road you can just go, if you have the right vehicle. Did I just write "vehicle"? 

We went in this:

Finnur's Toyota HiLux heavily modified four wheel drive truck (that's Scott shooting). Transfer case, hi-low range, locking differentials, big wheels, extra fuel tank, fender flares, skid plates, built in air compressor, satellite phone, GPS, snorkel equipped; this thing sits so high you need a ladder to get into it. Got a river to cross? No problem. Mountain to climb? No worries. Unstoppable. So Cool.

We left early in the morning and drove into this long, green valley with a ridge at the top where two glaciers, one on either side, had left this sharp edge behind as they receded:

and drove for a couple of hours up to a long valley on a road that went from paved, to gravel, to dirt, to a muddy track, to something that resembled a trail that crossed rivers and snaked up the side of a mountain.

Iceland, here in the mountains, is all about water; water in glacial and rain run-off rivers that are two different colors, streams, waterfalls and rock falls, with this intense green moss that holds water like a sponge and is a color you can't believe it doesn't come out of a Day-Glo spray can called "Chartreuse":

We came across a touristy waterfall where I followed around twin blond haired blue fleece-shirted boys:

and took pictures of people taking pictures:

and, after a search, to a lava field:

where Finnur had been as teenager on a date to swim by climbing down a crevasse to a hot pool:

to a hot bath filled with noisy French having the time of their lives:

Did we go in? Was the water blue? Of course we did.

I'd better stop here. This may be too much for you to to take in just one sitting. At any rate, we stopped for the night at Finnur's cabin, or retreat or hut or get away man-cave (that he'd had moved from farther south a few years ago) and bar b'que'd lamb chops on the grill, drank beer, and told stories as guys do that may have been a little off color at times and laughed and went to bed.

Next up: Finnur's Trip Day 2.

Reminder: as always, click on an image and it will increase all the photographs in the post in size.

Ólöf Einarsdóttir is a textile artist and the third resident artist working this July at the Baer Art Center in Iceland that I am profiling. Ólöf is from Iceland and lives in Reykjavik.

I spoke with her in her studio at Baer a few days ago, which is right next to mine. I learned that Ólöf studied textiles, tapestry and fabric at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts from 1980-1985. By the time she was a second year student she had decided to major in tapestry but had also was very interested in graphic design. I asked her if she knew then that she would be an artist rather than a crafts person and she said yes, emphatically. She knew right away that she wanted to work with fabrics expressively, abstractly and artistically.

Most of Ólöf's work references Iceland and its traditions, culture and history.

By 1988 a few years out of school she began working with horsehair as a way to make her pieces which involved intertwining horse hairs to make flat and later three dimensional pieces. She also used sisal, a natural fiber used to make twine, which she would separate out into individual stands and then reform into her pieces.

This is a highly labor intensive process, requiring patience and a steady hand. Her constructions are vey often very spare in look and yet, on a closer view,  they reveal many layers and are very intricate.

Quite early after school she began to use several forms as a kind of foundation to her work, the most prominent being the triangle:

The pieces are large, perhaps 3 to 4 feet in their longest dimension. Although hung on a wall, they are not, strictly speaking, flat but have some depth.

Most of her work pays homage to Icelandic culture and traditions and is a reflection of the unique character of Iceland, its spare and minimal landscape, but also its turbulent volcanoes and huge glaciers. It is a primal place and her work speaks to that with restraint but also with a quiet power as well.

By this time she had begun showing her works, most often in textile shows in Iceland or in small group shows where she represented the fabric arts along with painters and sculptors.

During this time she combined materials, including horsehair, and made braided bands using an ancient Icelandic technique.

In 1988 Ólöf began making three dimensional pieces that hung from a support above and were displayed so that you could walk around them:

These seem to me like a logical extension of the wall pieces and are enriched by having real form as opposed to being primarily a flat surface. These pieces also have a wonderful quality of the top half sitting on a reflective surface as in water with the bottom half sitting below the surface.

Her intent here was to allow for different views and to engage the viewer in the piece more interactively.  As a logical evolution of her this work, she started working   collaboratively in 2002 with her sister Sigrún Ólöf  Einarsdóttir, a prominent glass artist in Iceland (http://www.gleribergvik.is). Planning their pieces together they made a series of combined flat floor-based structures, wall hangings and free standing forms that were glass that utilized horsehair as well:

This piece aboce is about 4 feet square.

As they continued,  the pieces became less flat, initially geometric 

and then, with some new techniques learned abroad, more organic:

The collaboration continues to this day. In early 2002  the two sisters worked to create a large body of work for an exhibition in Denmark called "Glass Threads"with Sigrún's husband Soren Larsen, who died in 2003. Ólöf continues to work on her own as well and currently has several works on display in France.

Ólöf  at work in her studio this week. 

It has been a real pleasure to work side by side this past month with such an accomplished, disciplined and prolific fabric artist. I have learned a great deal about her practice and Ólöf has shared her love and passion for her country with all of us at Baer as well.  

Ólöf's website is: here.

Hofsos is the small town closest to the residency where we stay at Baer. It is an easy bike ride of 20 minutes or so into town and I've found some things to photograph.

New for me is to emphasize one building in a series. Here are a few from the larger group:

The day was flat and gray, perfect for me, about to rain and cold with little wind, and this green siding'd building presented challenges and rewards by working slowly and looking and thinking as I moved around it.

When can photographs mean more than the subject they depict? When can photographs evoke an emotional response? Does emotion put in equate to quality of image coming out? How does an urban landscape picture ever mean more than just what is there? Man, if I knew the answers to those questions don't you think I would just bang off a few and hang up my camera?

See, there was this hill behind this building that just slayed me, so green, empty and glowing. 

And then this final surprise as I'd done the full walk around of this light green and banded building at the harbor, the trailer with a buckled wheel and an odd fluid bend in it

which of course I put up against my favorite hill of all time:

Poetry? Music? Sublime? Boring? Mundane? Exquisite? Sumptuous? Sensual? Ordinary? Exceptional? Banal? You tell me: email

How someone can fall in love with a hill with a trailer in front of it is beyond me, but I love that.

The series isn't over here, although you'd think it would be. But I went up the gravel path on the right side of the frame in this one:

But before I walked it, and before I show you what will be the second chapter in an all time biggest series of 38 I spun back around to show the whole building a couple of different ways:

and from the end of the dock across the way from the center of the building:

That's it, Chapter 1 of Hofsos, Iceland 2013 by Neal Rantoul. I will post the full series up on the site in a day or two. This is another of my series that isn't in print form yet but they all are RTP (ready to print) and so should get down onto paper reasonably quickly when I get back in early August. Can't wait.

Next up? Pretty quickly Chapter 2 of this shoot from Hofsos where I climb the hill, walk across a river on a foot bridge and photograph some unusual buildings on the hill on the other side of the river.

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