Textures of Caribou Ranch

Red Barn, #1. Caribou Ranch Open Space, Colorado, 2016 (With the “Don’t Feed the Artist” sign out front.)

[NOTE: The “red barn” is not where the famous recording studio was located. The studio, which burned in 1985 and no longer exists, was located in another area farther to the northeast.]

I am just back from a splendid week as artist-in-residence (AIR) in the DeLonde Homestead’s “red barn” graciously maintained by Boulder County at Caribou Ranch Open Space. It truly was an amazing Walden-like week up at near 9,000 big size-12 feet above the beach in fairly primitive, but really quite comfortable, circumstances (in another post, especially for future AIRs, I’ll delve in to the practical details of life at the red barn).

Chapeau to Boulder County for hosting such a wonderful program in support of the arts!

To spend so much time observing one fairly small area of sub-alpine forest, one starts to notice more and more detail…you become acquainted with specific trees, specific anthills, the ponds, the meadows, individual bushes and sections of trail–they all start to become like old friends. And they all change as the globe spins on its axis and the sun glides imperceptibly slowly across the sky…the light is always different…the colors sometimes muted, sometimes deeply saturated…the hue of the sky and the cloud cover always mutating…the shadows start long, then shorten, then lengthen once again, following their daily ritual.

The one constant is constant change.

And being there for every moment from before sunrise through the waning twilight of the evening, I was witness to much of it. (Not all, of course, as that would be an impossibility!)

It wasn’t just seeing, but also listening…the bugling of the bull elk, the chirp of a passing hummingbird, the pounding of a hard rain on the tin roof, the cyclic waves of wind through the legions of fir, spruce, and aspen, the roar of the creek, the trickle-twinkle of the smaller rivulets, the dramatic crash of Thor throwing spears above, and even the sound of my own heartbeat at times when silence like an invisible curtain descended upon the forest and meadows…

Then, there was the smell…ay, the intoxicating fragrance…the heavy, pine-sweet perfume of a humid sub-alpine forest on the cusp of autumn. A heady mix of both the green of life and the yellow and brown of decay. Nature’s way. To fill the lungs with such cleansing, living air is such pure luxury.

So, how to capture any of this with the camera? Impossible, really. What I was able to do was merely scratch the dull fingernails along the bare and barely knowable surface of things.

I’ll recount more later…

For starters, though, here is a short series of five color images I might title “Textures of Caribou” if they were printed and exhibited together. The idea was to create a group of photographs, unified somewhat by style, which might capture some small aspect of the essence of the Caribou area. Sometimes the details–the more intimate landscapes if you will–can carry more actual meaning and visual weight than a grand panorama. Sometimes.

This one, a detail of a stray piece of mine or ranch debris, alludes to the dreams that once were in these parts–but dreams that have long since rusted away into the soil:

Crumpled Dreams. Caribou Ranch Open Space, Colorado, 2016

The wetlands, home to many creatures, great and very small…the largest being Bullwinkle and Company, of course:

Sunrise on the Swamp. Caribou Ranch Open Space, Colorado, 2016

And the water, bearer of life…here, an abstract interpretation:

North Boulder Creek, Abstract. Caribou Ranch Open Space, Colorado, 2016

A closer look at the wetlands. It’s all about the light, of course, with a bit of early morning dew:

Sunrise on the Swamp, #2. Caribou Ranch Open Space, Colorado, 2016

Sunrise on two of the massive ponderosa pines in the big meadow. Here, the transition begins, giving way to the fir and spruce forest at higher elevations: