Lake Pepin Photos From 2023
I‘ve spent many happy days working on a project to photograph Lake Pepin. The lake is a wide section of the Mississippi between Minnesota and Wisconsin. I’ve put together a video to showcase some of the photos from 2023. Many of them appeared in previous posts. I hope you enjoy them the second time around.
I’m writing this at the public library. A book on the painting of Wolf Kahn* caught my attention. Khan wrote the book’s text about his travels in search of landscapes. Some of his words seem relevant to the video.
In landscape painting we find moments when the tyranny of the horizon’s ever-troublesome division between the top and the bottom parts of the picture is overcome, in storms, in fog, in a shower of rain. This temporary unification is especially dramatic when painting a distant shower; then the sky truly seems to kiss the ground. If the shower is nearer and one can see past the edge of it to the horizon, then it appears as a gray curtain, and immediate drama results. [p. 27]
The light that suffuses the landscape at sunset, or just before, is especially inviting to me because it tinges everything with a warm glow. If it is a spectacular sunset, it causes me to go overboard; I lose all sense of decorum and wallow in coloristic blatancy, otherwise known as kitsch. [P. 136]
* Kahn, Wolf, “Wolf Kahn’s America: an artist’s travels”, 2003