Michael Flecky

My most recent series of photographs began during sabbatical while an Artist in Residence at the Ucross Foundation in Clearmont, Wyoming. During that time, I began to create images using leaves and branches from the imposing cottonwood trees on the Ucross grounds. These amazing found objects, gifts from the overhanging cottonwoods in the cool morning dew, came back with me to the studio, first to be admired, and then for study and appreciation. Eventually I responded with my camera, photographing still life arrangements in the Studio with large format film, scanning the film negatives, exposing objects directly to photographic paper as “photograms” or cameraless images, and eventually photographing them with a digital scanner. A number of sample prints made from digital files on local office copy paper encouraged me to consider these proof images as potential photographic exhibition prints.

After returning from Wyoming to my studio in Omaha, I continued testing and experimentation with inkjet printers on a wide variety of etching, watercolor, and drawing papers. I completed an exhibition of images, “In the Presence of Trees”, to which have been added images of other materials visually connected to trees including bark and needles, feathers and nests, flowers and grass, stones and bones. I have been very pleased with the results of printing on archival inkjet paper, as well as the compositional rendering of found objects on silver chloride printing out paper.