Visual Diary – Studio Michaelino

Orchids and Eastman

February 17, 2018 by admin

As a season approaches, the rituals surrounding its arrival are set. First come the seed catalogs. Next. in the City of Gardens, is the annual February forced blessing known as “The Dutch Connection”. And so we return each year to the George Eastman Museum – like many another migratory creatures stopping over while returning home. Where home, if you haven’t guessed, is also called Spring.

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Kingdom of Grey: A Sunny Day for Ice

August 4, 2016February 28, 2015 by admin

Rochester, as a City in the Kingdom of Grey, asserts itself each November and we rarely escape its fury of cold, ice and snow until April. February of 2015 was the coldest month on average that any one of us has “enjoyed.” There’s no doubt that Global Warming continues, but this month was proof that today’s weather and Climate Change aren’t always on the same page. The scientist in me knows that Regression to the Mean rules the trend. That doesn’t make those weeks when a glacier returned to my driveway and eventually entombed my car any less of a hassle. On the one day where ice could melt, my auto sank up to the rims. Even twenty pounds of cat litter still did not help. There was barely anywhere to go, anyway. Meanwhile, at mid-month, the house next to the park across the street started asking for a portrait of its frozen stress. So I complied.

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A Dream of Mississippi

May 7, 2014 by Michael Tomb

Last night I had a dream of being back on the train, moving swiftly North across farmlands and the backyards of Mississippi towns. And while the sun was setting against a vaguely threatening sky. Someplace after leaving Greenwood. Except it wasn’t just a dream but also a memory of last week.

Taken from the Observation Car on the Northbound City of New Orleans

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Other People’s Art: Lost Birds on a Rainy Day

October 12, 2013 by Michael Tomb

The George Eastman House exhibit, in 2012, of Todd McGrain’s Sculptures from The Lost Bird Project, offered me an unexpected opportunity for closure. When I was young, I had read about the fate of the Passenger Pigeon and many other extinct species that had passed from the earth only a few generations earlier than my own birth. A sense of profound loss followed me as I matured and read works such as A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold and Wildlife in America by Peter Matthiessen. These were among other classics of environmentalism that I found in the library of my mother, who was a bird watcher as well as a lover of art and music. Somehow the story of the Passenger Pigeon touched me the most. Decades after I read of the species’s demise, I finally connected to a sense of mourning while visiting Todd’s sculptures. This was also true as I watched Todd’s film on this project during one of his visits to the museum.

On the last weekend of the visit of the Lost Bird to Rochester, I did my own photographic homage to Todd’s collection of sculpture. And a few months later, I also wrote a poem entitled Lament for the Lost Birds as another statement on the sense of the tragic loss within our world.

Photographs take at a visit to the George Eastman House Gardens of Sculptures from The Lost Bird Project by Todd McGrain

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