Westbound Road, Joyce Quadrangle, March 2009
Staying on the themes of the past few posts, my world is getting smaller and stranger the more I explore the peninsula. Even directly behind my house is an odd upheaval in expectation- there are these dense forests of stunted fir without ground clutter like some arid alpine thicket where the growing season only lasts 6 weeks. Completely atypical of this area, where salal, swordfern and other ground cover generally swarm with kinetic abandon. And the light is all wrong. There is a lovely diffuse glow in many of the forestes here, subalpine or rainforest; but these silver fir forests have a mono-organism austerity and darkness that borders on the fantastic. It’s almost a struggle to make these scenes look real- especially at these small sizes where the contrasts compound and the details seem to reverse into negative space. Each day there’s a new surpirse in the surrounding woods, almost as if spreading nightly in moonfed generation.