It seems like the obvious place to start so it’s where I’ll start for now, even if it’s not where I started before. I was looking through a used bookstore in rural Michigan for wonderfully weathered paper that I might print on, when I came upon the second edition of “A Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals” by Frederick H. Pough, from The Peterson Field Guide Series, printed in May of 1956. I thought I would probably cut out some pages with interesting text or graphics and print over them, it was a general approach I was taking to printing at the time but a significant part of me felt like I was being insensitive and ignorant towards the actual content of these books. How can I make an artwork with some geological information as the substrate, but not have explored my curiosity much further than the words that appear on that single page? So I kept the book and find myself almost a year later reading into it in hopes of discovering what kind of rocks I had been looking at when I made a particular picture.
I took the picture on a camping trip with my brother along the northern California coastal range. I had just seen a Vija Celmins retrospective, and I couldn’t think about anything else but views of the ground before me and the all-over compositions she reproduced so wonderfully in graphite.
The word “Shale” was floating around my head somehow as I stumbled on the picture in my harddrive today. I hadn’t been inclined to identify any of the rocks I’ve made pictures of before, but I’ve been really excited by the rock photographs of Bronwen Wickstrom, and I spoke with her briefly in the park yesterday, so I decided to give the whole identification thing a try. Pough’s Field Guide says this about Shale on p. 316: “The thin layers and the fine clayey material that compose shale are very characteristic, but its color may vary from black to white, with grays, dark reds and greens very common. Fossils, often of leaves and plant remains, are frequent.” I can’t quite remember what color this particular shale was, if it was shale, but I really do believe it was pretty much the grey you see here. Imagine running down a hill of this stuff, every foot sinking into it and rebounding your weight from foot to foot in strides of increasing distance until the slope settles down; that’s a wonderful way to expend the potential energy of elevation.
