A Tree Falls in Swarthmore

One of our trees fell on the house the other day. We estimate the height of it to have been somewhere around 60 feet. It got a little windy, the trees swirled a bit, I went to Accuweather.com to look for weather warnings, and as I was about to click on the first link there, the world came down around me. Well, that's what it sounded like, anyway.








The tree hit the chimney, sending the block and brick toward the new egress dormer. It took a massive hit but stayed up there (testament to good construction--gotta thank our contractor for that!). The window looks undamaged. The chimney debris hit the ground, taking out grill #1. The top of the tree snapped off, flipped over, and hit the ground, taking out Scott's second, and favorite, grill.













You get a better idea of the size of the tree with the guys standing around it.

The tree fell right along the corner of one of the hips to the roof of the sunroom--good thing, because the branches straddled it there and preserved all of the new work inside (drywall, mudding, taping, etc).







This is a good tree.....

.....and this is a bad tree.

Sliced right through that supporting corner and there are several cinder blocks resting on the unsound roof at this point. The chimney liner you see in there was installed with the new fireplace insert on the first floor. We're pretty sure the insert is okay. Losing the liner is no big deal.

Not bad, considering the weight that fell on this part of the house.

This was almost our first finished room--my studio. I'm of the understanding that it will be gutted. It's covered by insurance though, thankfully.

The Place I Keep

Going through the archives and putting together the website--finally. I'm uploading a few images here first to get a feel for what I want on the site. This group of images represents a series I've been shooting since 2007. It's the zen project I turn to when the highly controlled work becomes too much. Funny that it's supposed to be a zen project because it's actually been fraught with all types of hazards. Many of the images have been posted here before, but this is the first time they're being posted together as a full group. The first ones up are here for the first time, and there are new ones on the way. An explanation and rough draft for an artist statement follow the images.

Summer-Fall 2007




























Senior Year, 2009-2010













This is a rough (very) draft from Dec '09 for an artist statement for this body of work. It was cobbled together from a couple of random thoughts and comments copy/pasted from emails sent to my sister Erin, also a photographer, with whom I’d been discussing the project in depth off and on for about a year. My original artist statement from 2007 was lost, and I found that in my conversations I’d said a lot about where the imagery was coming from. One good thing about email conversations vs face to face, I suppose. The grammar is poor, but the meaning is there. The last two paragraphs were part of an attempt to pull 5 of my 20 images from my thesis project to create a sub-project. For our senior show, I would only be able to hang 4 images and felt a need to pare things way down. Didn't go over very big, I'm afraid. So, stick to what you know, I guess. The images pulled from that thesis were actually supposed to come out like the original fuzzy, tangled tree images from 2007, but when I switched cameras for the sake of swiftness in the woods (4x5 with hazy brass lens to Lubitel), the effect wasn't the same. I loved the look of the new images though and would have enjoyed pursuing it more, but the images were too much like a group that an instructor of mine had done. That was his baby, and for me to go that route when he was already exploring it wouldn't have been right. I continue to shoot these things when I see them, but it's not a project I actively work on.

Dec 9, 2009:
I grew up in the vast concrete wilderness that is the O.C. in CA. My
family went camping a lot, but we usually went to the deserts for that.
Occasionally, though, we would go to the mountains and the woods. It
was like another planet for me. All of the trees and small waterways
were completely foreign to me, and each moment spent in those
places was a true exploration. These images are as close as I can get
to that same sort of discovery.

Memory is a fluid and creative thing. It alters reality, as I’m sure it has
altered my impressions of the places I saw in my childhood. Those
places seem almost too enchanted now to have ever been real. Maybe
that’s how they really are for a little kid—I don’t know. There seemed
to be a purpose to their existence because they were so rare.
Southern California is very dry, even in the mountains, so these green
and wooded areas with running streams are isolated and not easy to
find. The places I shoot in out here are totally surrounded by suburban
developments. They seem every bit as isolated, rare and enchanted as
the places I remember from camping in California.

What I want to convey is a sense of an uncommon and natural place
that is off the beaten path and hard to find. Something that is rare,
mysterious, and has a purpose and life all its own.

The Lubitel (original Lomo camera) has a cheap lens on it that isn’t
corrected for spherical or chromatic aberrations, and I knew that this
would create a swirling in the background blur and some strong
vignetting. I chose this camera because I felt the swirling would call
attention to the tangles of the plants and trees and to the dizzying
effects of the high canopy.

I look for anything that seems a little extraordinary and what a
person won’t necessarily see if they stick to the trail. I get into some
pretty hard to reach places and fully expect to get a bad case of poison
ivy one of these days. The trees and other plants have a symbiotic
relationship that is sometimes beneficial to each and sometimes
deadly to one. They support each other and weigh each other down at
the same time. Life in the woods is very much like life elsewhere
except that it moves very slowly. I look for relationships between the
various elements in the scenes.

I want to draw the eye to those specific relationships and the
beautiful contours and shapes that have been created by them over
time. Most of these images have been shot at the edges of the woods
where man has cultivated the land adjacent to it with farms or
suburban developments. The plants create a barrier here that is sort of
like a scar. It’s thick, complex, and tough to get through.

Home reno projects

Okay, I'm starting to nod off here--getting old. The first images are of the front of the house, and the contractors are bringing the sheetrock and other supplies up through a hole they made in the roof which is where one of the two new dormers went in. It was a lot of fun to watch. They looked at me like I was being silly making a fuss taking pictures and all, but it was pretty exciting. All in a day's work for them though. The front of the house was painted last year, and all of the over grown shrubs were taken out a few months prior to that. We plan on putting in an informal/formal french country garden all around the house. A few weeds are totally welcome in Swarthmore. I like that.....






The following images are inside the space where the two new dormers went. It was completely unfinished, but two original and unused metal windows (no glass in them) were found in an attic loft space when the A/C was going in. We could have used one of those but since code now says you need an egress size window in any new finished space that's closed off with a door, we had to put in one large dormer. We ended up replacing all of the windows in the attic, wavy antique glass and all, for the sake of uniformity.








This is the sunroom before drywall demo. We could see from the outside of the house that the room had boarded up former openings (windows? screens?) on three sides, and a hole in the main attic that peeped into the peek of the sunroom showed us that the orginal beadboard was still up there between the rafters.






Someone was a heavy smoker. We have traces of their life all over the house, but none are as prominent as the ones in this room were. I actually liked the look of these walls so much I had to make photos just to be able to remember what they looked like.




Sunroom, post drywall demo. I don't think the blue is original. There is a bright green on the old woodwork in two of the openings in this room, and I'm pretty sure that is original. It was painted carefully, as opposed to the sloppy blue paint, and the green is a theme with the woodwork throughout the house. The woodwork for the side-facing (end) wall is gone. The cracks above the windows are fine as long as we put some new framing in the one that's missing its woodwork and has the nastiest crack. We had a structural engineer in the other day, 78 years old and named Fred. Nice guy who's been doing this for a long time. He gave us the go ahead as long as we put in that framing before we put in new windows. There are still hinge marks in the opening (the one that was COMPLETELY closed off) where french doors used to be. Can you believe someone actually dropped the ceiling in this room to 8' and covered all this up??






The fuzzy little people are Sheba and Molly, and they're back in one of their favorite places after we destroyed it. I think they like it even more now. They are such good cats and great little buddies to have around. The image just below this shows the framing that still has the hinge marks from the french doors.



Should be a happy little oasis someday soon. :)