Rock, Drake’s Beach by Mark Citret.
Citret specializes in his own brand of landscape work, which incorporates architecture…and human tracings on everything we touch.
In the 1980s he produced “Unnatural Wonders,” a personal survey of architecture in the national parks. He spent four years in the early 1990s creating “Coastside Plant,” which charted the growth of a massive construction site in the San Francisco area he’s called home for almost 40 years. Throughout, he shoots the play of ocean and sky from the cliff behind his house in Daly City…that strange Bay City suburb of endless sameness once seen as monotony but now becoming known as a key modern architectural experience.
“If I hold any convictions at all as a photographer, foremost among them would be the belief that there are pictures lurking everywhere. They are concealed and camouflaged in the landscape that surrounds us, whether urban, rural, wild, or cultivated,” he writes of his deepest aesthetic beliefs. “The trick is finding those pictures. It is all the more difficult because they are right in front of us all the time. Over the years I’ve come to realize that I do my best work, that is, I find my best pictures, when I’m either looking for something else, or when I’m not looking for anything at all.”
Citret will be at CPW teaching a workshop in shooting the world around one individualistically, and learning to identify and trust one’s own vision. For years, his has been one of the more popular of CPW’s annual offerings.
“As a photographer I am drawn equally to all of these various ‘scapes’: the urban, the wilds, the rural, the built environment, the fresh, the decaying,” he has also noted. “When the camera is on my shoulder and the eyes set in automatic pilot, they all offer equal fascinations, whether isolated or in combinations. There came a point when I realized that as a photographer I related to all of these as integral parts of the ‘landscape.’
In addition to teaching at UC Berkeley and other schools, Citret gets hired to shoot architecture, both in construction and during preservation. He’s a great speaker, a deep thinker, and his images are as cooling as a soft, late summer breeze.
His lecture at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, located at 59 Tinker Street, starts at 8 p.m. Saturday, August 13. Get there early. ++
For further information call 679-9957 or visit www.cpw.org.
WSA auction set
What a beautiful place the Woodstock School of Art is. From the bones of its New Deal era main buildings (see accompanying piece) and woodsy sculpture-studded campus, reaching out to one of the best meadow views of Overlook in the region, it’s a palpable home for the nurturing of creativity. And its many upgrades in recent years, including its main studio classrooms and administrative building/gallery, have given anyone who’s seen them a sense of pride.
But there’s still much work to do. Which means, in our modern way, much money to be raised.
Sunday afternoon, August 14, the Fletcher Gallery on Mill Hill Road will be holding a special auction in collaboration with the School of Art benefiting the WSA Building Fund, featuring a fabulous array of art from Woodstock legends, and contemporary instructors at the WSA, plus some key outsiders including, from the looks of things, a photo by the great Ruth Bernhard and a print by none other than Rembrandt van Rijn.
Previews of the work will be up at Fletcher Gallery all this week, up until auction time. The actual auctioneering will be by gallery owner Tom Fletcher, a master at the form…both in person, at the point of sale, and in his increasingly adept rounding up of great work for such occasions. The catalogue is also available online.
Talk about an opportunity. And don’t forget to save room for WAAM’s annual event, coming up in a few more weeks…++
Fletcher Gallery is located at 40 Mill Hill Road. The auction starts at 1:0 PM. Call the gallery at 679-4411 for information the day of the event. For more on the auction, catalogue, and WSA itself, call 679-2388 or visit www.woodstockschoolofart.org.
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