Figure 1 – The Melt, first day of spring 2015, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Yesterday was the first full day of spring, and I stopped along side the road to photograph this little grove of trees by a stream in Concord, Massachusetts.  My goal was to capture the sense of the spring melt.  This is what I refer to as an intimate landscape.  It is not a screaming vista but an isolated group of trees along a little brook. For me it epitomizes the wetlands of Eastern Massachusetts.  It is what I strive for in a landscape.  When I analyze my motivations I recognize that I have an ideal or standard set by the nineteenth century artist Samuel Palmer and my the early English calotype landscape artists. It is how I visualize the landscape – a soft creamy sepia tone and perhaps a just a touch exagerated sharpness so as to create a sense of an etching.  And I have come to realize that in the work of the greats like Palmer there is a key aspect of cool dampness that belies the richness and fertility of the soil, the emphasis of the landscape as a living thing