Lumens, photograms, chemigrams: new pictures from Bashir

Bashir, Falling, 2014

After a 4-year hiatus (see the Bashir post for Sept 2010 here) I wanted to see what Bobby Bashir was doing - I never seemed to catch up with him although we'd spoken on the phone often enough.  I knew he'd left the Monterey Peninsula and was working somewhere near Paso Robles.  So a few weeks ago I called to say I was coming down.  He asked me to bring fixer and developer because he had none, and could I lend him some Foma and maybe some Forte, if I had any, two of his favorite papers?  It seems like he'd run out of supplies a few months back and just hadn't gotten around to reordering.  By midsummer he slows down, he says, the drowsy days make him less keen to do much outside of work, and his artmaking pretty much comes to a halt.  My visit hopefully would change that.

It was afternoon when I pulled in.  He greeted me outside the restaurant in high spirits and fussed over details of my trip.  Was I tired?  He insisted I eat before doing anything.  He signaled to a red-smocked girl leaning by the kitchen and in no time a huge plate appeared, laden with steaks of abalone, squid, peppers, squash and tomatoes - I was ambushed.  "But Bobby, you didn't have to!"  "You've got to try my new salsa on the abalone - it's a secret recipe!" he grinned.  We sat outside.  Business was slow, so Bobby helped me finish a bottle of cab as we traded gossip and laughed.  Before long - I'd finished what I could - he took me to a shed in the back where he kept a sort of studio which doubled as a gardening closet for the winter garden of the restaurant.  He was eager to show me his newer pieces. 

Bashir, Gathering, 2014

Bashir, Watching, 2014

Bashir, Knowing, 2014

I couldn't hide my excitement on seeing these.  A lot had changed: his palette was freer and darker, his intent more dramatic.  And yet he was working as he has always done and as he was taught, with simple steps and few variables.  The choices are still there: paper, developer, fixer, wash, sunlight, material to draw with, and time.  "Time is the most important of these, just like in cooking.  It's how everything happens, even life - especially life," he says, talking from the other Bobby inside of him.  "It took a billion years for the first bacteria to emerge on earth.  So I ask myself, how long should I leave a piece in the sun?  Where is the sun in the sky and what kind of light are we getting?"

As he talks he begins to assemble a few materials on a piece of Foma.  This one will feature blueberries and a few small leaves.  As a rule he wets the surface with tea, coffee, or fruit juice, or spritzes it with fixer or developer - just a smidgen - or sometimes sprinkles a few drops of a random chemical from the gardening supplies.  He's done and now moves quickly toward the sun, the paper and blueberries pressed between two sheets of glass.  The smush of berries leaks out the side.  He encourages this and rocks the setup back and forth so that liquids bathe different regions of the paper.  Then he props it on a wad of napkins on a crate, letting the sun strike it at an angle.  How long?  "Five minutes to an hour, that's my world.  Everything I do is inside that."  He says he's particularly fond of the slanting reddish light at the end of the day, the long rays favored by the poets.  He looks more serious today than I remember him.  Yes, there are still the festoons of flowers (or flowerlike materials), and the twisty garlands of tones that have given his work its special rhythm, but his intensity speaks of a determination to push this thing as far as he can, far beyond decoration and niceness.  I'm wondering if he had a fight with Chris.

While we wait for the sun and juices to join forces on his paper, he sets up trays, apologizing:  "I rarely use developer for more than a second, if that.  Still, I need that tray ready."  He has a fixer tray and a wash tray close at hand, and an eyedropper and a brush.  We have a moment, so he pulls out some lumens from earlier in the year to show me.  I'm reminded suddenly of the Flemish baroque masters who trafficked in that same conceit of flowers.  Here's Nicolaes van Verendael in 1676, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London:

Van Verendael, Flowers beneath a cartouche, 1676

I realize too that what Bobby is making is really a photogram, in a sense, as well as a chemigram - that there is a continuum that takes us over all these separate 'disciplines' and demonstrates their common ancestry.  Chemicals, juices, stencils, cutouts, resists - these are the tools and it's just a shift in emphasis or outlook to pass from one to the other.  I watch now as his hands fly over the trays and minute interventions are made on the piece he's creating.  Then, at a certain moment, a moment very familiar to chemigramists, he stops.  "Done!" he cries, and there's that grin again.  He hangs it to dry; it'll be called Falling and it's at the top of this post.  He puts together a bundle of lumens to take with me.  We have an espresso, a hug, and it's adiós.  The red-smocked girl runs to my car at the last minute with a chicken tamale, all wrapped for the ride.

Bashir, Loving, 2014

Bashir, Dreaming, 2014

Naming wildflowers in the desert

Casanave, Wave Machine, Monterey Bay Aquarium, 2013

(A guest post by Bobby Bashir)

When my boyfriend Chris suggested we drive down to Arizona to look at the wildflowers I said why not and we began planning it right away.  I don't know why I hadn't thought of it first.  But Chris does whims very well, that's one thing (there are others) I love about him.  It was February after all and in a few weeks we knew the first yellow blooms of brittlebush would dot the high deserts and mountains east of Phoenix, sending all who hiked up there into transports of joy or at least disbelief.  We exchanged a brief kiss to seal the deal and decided that's something we wanted to be a part of.

Bashir, Near Apache Junction, Arizona

I called Omar - could he cover for me at the restaurant?  No problem.  Next I had to tune up the old van with new belts and brakes for the 10 hour drive ahead, then freshen up the living space in back and I don't just mean redecorate although that too - we had found some royal blue Ralph Lauren floral patterns and I had a few notions about how to use them.  Then we put in new supports, not springs exactly but what you could call a distant relative of the spring, under the saggy bed, cleaned the espresso machine and test-ran our slow-cook oven - my big contribution from a trip last year to Bodega Bay - on a bulging chicken tamale I confected for the purpose.  It worked.  By Saturday everything was ready and we headed out.

I let Chris drive and we followed the old pony express trail known as Interstate 10 till we got to the Arizona border.  He's tireless behind the wheel, I really admire him for that.  Too talkative maybe, depending on your mood and whether you want to hear the same crazy stories again, true they're a little different each time, a new inflection here, a new character there, but it gave me time to figure out where we might want to go once we reached what they call the East Valley around Scottsdale and Mesa.  It was then I noticed that Art Intersection in Gilbert was about to open a show of alt-photography called Light Sensitive 2014.  I scanned the entries online and recognized several names.  Hey, we could drop in, it's just down the road from Mesa.  Chris was a fan of my lumen prints so he thought it'd be fun to check it out too.

Darkness was falling when we found the gallery.  The opening was in progress upstairs, lights blazed and you could see figures moving about at the windows, but I for one was pretty tired and hungry (I'd taken over the wheel after crossing the Colorado River) so we said let's eat before we go up.  On the ground floor was a place called the Euro Cafe that looked active.  We got a table and I ordered the spanaki balls (spinach, rice, mozzarrela and provolone), an overwhelming portion that I shouldn't have gone for, medically speaking, while Chris had the pork molise, grilled pork wrapped in bacon topped with an apricot & cherry sauce, alongside horseradish mashed potatoes.  We staggered out, leaning and bumping into each other, well fed but already nostalgic for the delicate wonders of California seafood.  Could we survive in Arizona?

Bashir, Art Intersection by daylight, Gilbert, Arizona

Bashir, At the opening

Yes, as it turned out.  The gallery was more spacious and attractive than we'd thought, and the pictures handsomely lit and hung.  The attendees, probably locals from their weathered tans, seemed unexpectedly alert and knowledgeable about the niche interests of 19th century hand-crafted analog photographic art, if we properly judged their somber nods and whispers.  We circulated.  There was considerable mystery on the walls and, often, beauty as well.  You had gum bichromates, bromoils, ziatypes, tintypes, argyrotypes, platinum palladium prints, a few chemigrams and pinholes and even a lumen if I'm not mistaken.  Have I missed anything?  No mordançages this year, sorry Brittany.  Chris's favorite was Martha Casanave's low-angle pinhole with very selective hand coloring called Wave Machine, which recalls the dreamy theatricality of her great book, Explorations Along An Imaginary Coastline, still available from Amazon and which everyone should rush out and get.  The critics haven't yet come close to doing justice to Martha's work; she awaits her ideal interpreter.  But I predict her day will come.

My own salute goes to Douglas Collins' strange, and strangely funny, untitled piece, a chemigram.  Don't ask me what it 'means,' but I'm told there's no story behind it, no allusions.  It is what it is as they say.  Later Chris and I, up in the Tonto National Forest north of Apache Junction, spent a whole evening talking about it, reaching no agreement whatsoever, and then going off in tangents from it after our third bottle of wine.  That's what alt-photo art can do to you.

Collins, untitled, 2013

Bashir, A creosote bush

So this post has become more about the art in Gilbert than the wildflowers we came all this way to see.  Let me show you some pictures to prove how wrong you are.  Did you know that cacti have flowers?  I like to taste their flowers too, I keep them in my shirt pocket and nibble on them as I ramble and roam.  There were also lupines (mementos of home!) just coming up, and desert marigolds, and here and there a creosote bush, lots of yellow, yes, you have to wait later in the season for more of the blues and whites like peppergrass, one of my personal treats.  Chris thinks I'm nuts.  Let him say that.  Another time I'll tell you about his problems.

Luckily we didn't meet up with any scorpions but that's not what you think of when you're having fun. 

Bashir, Somewhere in the Superstition Mountains

Bashir, Near Pinnacle Peak

Bobby Bashir
Seaside, California
www.bobbybashir.com

A treat for the dog days

Preece, Chemigram Texturology, 2013

It's the end of summer, the dog days they call it, but here on the Monterey Peninsula these are glorious days, hardly a cloud in the sky, perfect temperatures for humans on earth.  The sea churns on the rocks at Point Lobos as always, and if you peek through the pines you can just catch sight of whiskered sea otters bobbing in the waves beneath the cliffs, sometimes joined, incongruously - but there is so much of that it seems natural - by a seal or a kayaker.  Further inland in the mountains where I live, the red-tailed hawks glide on the afternoon thermals in the canyons, their magnified silhouettes skittering darkly over chaparral.  At sunset a great horned owl appears and below, a bobcat or a skunk slink about to claim the meadow where earlier had grazed deer and turkey.  My neighbor Mike has called his goats to their pen and his chickens to their coop.  Soon the first evening stars will appear but it's not toward Pegasus in the east that I'll be drawn tonight - that's easy pickins - but to Arcturus and Spica low in the west, where with luck I'll see not only Saturn but Venus too, goddess of love, the bright queen of the sky of the Babylonians.  She'll be low on the horizon so for that I'll have to climb the ridge.  Dog days indeed.

Yet this will ease my conscience at not doing any cameraless photography this month, and I will not hide my excuse: the bees have established a hive in the old shed where I keep my workbench and I am prevented.  I think I should go down the valley to visit Bobby Bashir or Jeff Robinson to fire my enthusiasm and remind me of what I miss.  Or Martha Casanave, who met me at the Portola the other day when we talked about her new book, Trajectories, which continues, in the months I've had it, to leave me with an uncanny tang of absence (strangely biting and attractive if I can speak like that), the absence of others and of ends to stories.  An aching, extremely beautiful book.

And then a gift arrived from Nolan Preece, a new chemigram.  Here it is, up above.  "Eee-gads!" cried Martha.  It's a sort of cavalcade of his own favorite chemigrams from recent years, woven into an elegant grid of chemigramic portals.  The whole affair seems destined to open a new chapter in what a chemigram is and can be.  We'll get the details from Nolan another time.  For now enjoy, it's the end of summer.

Bobby Bashir's lumens

Bashir, Wasting, 2010

Bashir, Lasting, 2010

Bashir, Holding, 2010

Bashir, Feeling, 2010

Roberto "Bobby" Bashir is a young man living in the valley below my mountain cabin on the Monterey Peninsula. He works as a seafood cook, and when he's not inspecting new shipments of squid or salmon or arranging things on a plate, he likes to make lumen prints, which he does out back behind the restaurant. He uses the bounteous wildflowers of the region, grasses, leaves, and more recently the leftover food from customer plates, trimmings, and kitchen scraps. He picked up the technique down the coast in Ventura, and does it to amuse himself.

Bobby mostly uses Foma FB paper from Croatia, which he gets from Freestyle. He likes the reds and earthy oranges, and the delicate feel of it as it dries. He exposes for 20-30 minutes (we're in California mind you), fixes in ammonium thiosulfate for maybe a minute or two, washes ("have to do it, but I lose the great deep blues and cyans from the fixer"), then usually soaks it in Kodak Rapid Selenium toner until he's satisfied. Then a final wash, and dry. And yes, he wears gloves and is very careful not to contaminate the kitchen, but he asks us not to reveal the name of his restaurant. Just in case.

What I love about his process is his use of juices and teas as a thin bath for the plants or foods on the paper. As these liquids dry, they lightly develop a trail on the paper, creating an illusion of depth or shadow which goes well with the quiet lyricism of his work. He favors the multifruit concoctions so prevalent nowadays like orange-pineapple-mango, and the unsweetened iced teas. Another advantage of using liquids where plant meets paper is that you reduce the problem of things sticking to the paper, a problem common in lumen printing, particularly in long exposures. Jalo Porkkala's excellent Finnish site 'vedos' discusses these and many other issues in lumen printing in a fairly thorough way; interested artists should consult it. I also recommend spending time looking at the late Jerry Burchfield's work, both his pictures and his articles on lumen printing. Meanwhile, back to the kitchen with Bobby Bashir.