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bardicarts.bsky.social
🍃 Words between the lines of age #Photography #TomOgburn #Landscapes #TheParkwayProjects
#OpenParksNetwork #ClemsonUniversity
#Stunday #ArtYear #EastCoastKin #TheBlueRidgeParkway

🦉"Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time"🌙
#TheodoreRoosevelt #Illustration
parkwaysprojects.bsky.social The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · May 10
Words between the lines of age #photography #TomOgburn #TheParkwayProjects #BlueSkyArtShow #Lines #ArtYear #EastCoastKin ≈ a nod to Neil Young for the title 🪔

“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.” ≈ #JosephCampbell 🌙🦉
A picnic table my family ate at on August 9th 1969, 50 years to the day before this photo was made. It's a 1940 vintage steel tubular legged frame with poplar top & benches. A small leaf, spotted green, yellow & brown on one plank, a red rock from Moab, Utah on another. "Someone & someone were down by the pond Looking for something to plant in the lawn Out in the fields they were turning the soil I'm sitting here hoping this water will boil When I look through the window & out on the road They're bringing me presents & saying hello Singing words, words between the lines of age Words, words between the lines of age If I was a junkman selling you cars Washing your windows & shining your stars Thinking your mind was my own in a dream What would you wonder & how would it seem? Living in castles a bit at a time The king started laughing & talking in rhyme Singing words, words between the lines of age Words, words between the lines of age" ≈ Neil Young From posts I made along the way while tracing the journey my family made in 1969, as Neil Young's star was rising. The trace based on Mom's journals she always kept along the way. The images will be divided into 11 correlated sequences of works, each addressing a different facet of the changes I've observed. There are some very different scenarios up there these days & places, almost haunted, brought forward by the entropy & abandoned areas—once large & resplendent picnic grounds. The thing is, the 5 or 6 interwoven narratives that are still extant, are winnowing away pretty fast along the parkways due to all the funding & infrastructure cuts. These old picnic tables being pushed up out of the earth are just plain eerie, considering the number of instances this is occurring. I finally learned what’s causing it, after drilling down on it for a week or so last year. Permafrost changes. Not like in the arctic of course but still around to enough of a degree to do what it’s doing to memories & concrete up there.
May 11, 2025 at 4:57 AM
bardicarts.bsky.social
🪰The Celadon Hallows Dragoons #Landscapes #TomOgburn #TheParkwayProjects #Stunday #ArtYear #EastCoastKin #OpenParksNetwork #ClemsonUniversity
#TheBlueRidgeParkway #Photography #Illustration

🦉"Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time"🌙
#TheodoreRoosevelt
parkwaysprojects.bsky.social The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Feb 25
#Photography #LandscapePhotography #MobilePhotography #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #ShotoniPhone #Nature

“The Celadon Hallows Dragoons,” 2018 A modern case-hardened concrete standard-issue South Carolina lowcountry bridge, with squatters.

ALTtext ⬇️
I’d stopped to make something of an odd blemish on a newly blacktopped road in the low country swamps of SC. I have a few workups of an up-top scene of the roadbed itself within my prep folders awaiting some thoughts, but Nosferatu comes to mind more often as its ultimate resolution. No kidding. Yes, that Nosferatu. And Jimmy Hoffa's final resting place. What? In South Carolina? You'd be surprised. I’d stopped to make something of an odd blemish on a newly blacktopped road in the low country swamps of SC. Which is what I’d come to borrow for images on that day. As I finished with the blemish I noticed an odd absinthe-colored tinge to the light reflected on the blackwater, underneath the bridge. I wandered down below. Happenstance is often an invitation to old worlds and new encounters if one follows their gut instincts, curiosity and intuition. A brilliant celadon green, which always grabs my attention, has coated the under-structure of a bridge in South Carolina. Time of day was also at play, for the afternoon light was bouncing off the creek, illuminating the strange green element, which had to be either some kind of mold, or possibly a sprayed-on treatment by the state roads commission. The case-hardened concrete, new steel girders and best yet, all the dirt dauber and regular wasps have a real nursery down here. And yes, they were all flying about as I was walking through the brackish water to get some good angles of view, buzzing around me as if I had invaded their Celadon Hallows. For I had done just that. The things we do for Love. And Art, not to mention when the two come in recombinant forms. Ars longa, vita brevis, indeed.
May 11, 2025 at 4:52 AM
bardicarts.bsky.social
Full Stop #Photography #Landscapes #TomOgburn #TheParkwayProjects #Stunday #ArtYear #EastCoastKin #TheBlueRidgeParkway #TheGreatSmokyMountainsNP

🦉"Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time"🌙
#TheodoreRoosevelt #Illustration #OpenParksNetwork
May 11, 2025 at 5:22 AM
bardicarts.bsky.social
🪔 Trail worn by use; burnished in time #Landscapes #TomOgburn #TheParkwayProjects #Stunday #ArtYear #EastCoastKin #OpenParksNetwork #ClemsonUniversity
#TheBlueRidgeParkway

🦉"Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time"🌙
#TheodoreRoosevelt #Photography #Illustration
parkwaysprojects.bsky.social The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · May 10
🦉🪔Trail worn by use; burnished in time #photography #nature #landscapes #TomOgburn #TheParkwayProjects #BlueSkyArtShow #Lines #ArtYear #EastCoastKin 🌲

I'll add the original image below in the comment thread.
🧵⬇️4ALT
Black balsam firs are very odd looking trees, because they are ancient, evolving at higher altitudes. A very dense bark, often covered in green moss & lichen create a display of dark needles & bark set off by brilliant electric green moss, yet this image in black & white & toned sepia by me. Archival Librarians working very much in their own high tech universe derived from our own past the incremental moments when those who have come & gone long before us in their race to record a world lost to Time, now being recovered by a very skilled & dedicated team of very creative folk. As soon as I saw this image I noticed first the moss. It looks like it envelopes all of the tree trunks, even the smaller foreground ones. It was then I noticed the curve of the trail, the pitch—then the limbs, all close to each other & the 90º angle as they grow out from the trunk. I'm pretty sure I know where this trail lies. It's likely near the pinnacle of Mount Mitchell just off the main asphalt trail to the observation structure. I'll hike down it again soon & see it I can get a read on which part of that trail it is. The info listed by the NPS assigns it within The Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Mount Mitchell & the Parkway overlap at the place I'm almost certain is this location. In titling this work, I used the NPS title at front, then "burnished in time" to align or pair with another image soon to be worked up & titled in an inverted way. The other clue that's evident here seems to be the work of a motorized chopper or trimmer. Not the slingblades, machetes or bush axes of earlier years, which left a more controlled looking cut—but rather the the mangled cuts so indicative of motorized trimmers. Based on that observation I think this to be no earlier than from the late 1960s; more likely 1985 to 1995. If it is a later photo, then the odds are even better I'm correct on where this original image was made. The mysteries of the Clemson OPN system are just mind-boggling.
May 11, 2025 at 4:29 AM
parkwaysprojects.bsky.social
“A soft landscape” #OpenParksNetwork #DigitalArchiveScan from the #ClemsonUniversityArchives #Photography

#Stunday 🦋 #Landscapes #BlueskyPhotography
#Skyart #BlueskyArt #Art #NPS #StateParks #Nature
#GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #ShenandoahNationalPark
#TheParkwaysProjects by #TomOgburn
This soft and gently silvered image is scanned at around 3000dpi from an original glass plate negative of the CCC era photography in the formation years of The Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It is a classically framed scenic; a tree trunk rising from the lower left corner, then angling into the left frame. The leaves of another species of tree frame the right side of the image. Before us, in the open area is a foreground of foliage below the viewer's eyes in the medium shadow cast by the trees. Beyond that is a ridge, and then, if the further distance a very large mountain ridge of the beloved Blueridge Appalachian chain. #OPN is what we call this treasure trove of over 1.3 million extremely high resolution scans; usual live image areas averaging 5x7 to 11x15 inches, some much larger than that still—with some scans at 6000dpi, which is phenomenally impressive! The National Parks Service has collaborated with Clemson University's Archival Librarians to tackle the entire National Parks archive of all known photo prints and negatives (which for years—decades—have lain in an invisible status just solely due to the lack of technology to release these images back into our world. 95% of the Clemson OPN scans are in the public domain or part of their open source network. When I learned of the availability of these treasured images, I knew then I would add them to the stories and narrative I'm creating for "The Parkways Projects," which are now in their fifth year of process and preparation as newly restored images which will provide actual photographs for illustrations illuminating The Parkways Projects articles, stories, poems, sidebar information and other topics along the way. I'm referencing the history of the Parkways formation alongside the work to bring the Great Smoky Mountains and the Shenandoah National Parks into being. The idea to build the Parkways emerged from that great initial dream of building our National Parks using the Public Works Projects.
February 16, 2025 at 10:05 PM
bardicarts.bsky.social
4️⃣ I could say it began as an idea born of a promise to my parents; it was and is that. Beginnings though are manifold. Every beginning of course has an end.

🎞️ All of these sequences, artworks, words and illustrations, accompanied by vintage #NPS photos from the #OpenParksNetwork will have their...⬇️
April 29, 2025 at 4:14 PM
bardicarts.bsky.social
🪔 #OpenParksNetwork #ClemsonUniversity #TomOgburn #TheParkwayProjects #Stunday #ArtYear #EastCoastKin
#TheBlueRidgeParkway #TheGreatSmokyMountainsNP

🦉"Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time"🌙
#TheodoreRoosevelt
parkwaysprojects.bsky.social The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · May 10
And...90% of Clemson University's collaboration with the National Park System which is named the Open Parks Network, are Creative Commons or Public Domain.

If you do not see the Creative Commons or the Public Domain marks, contact OPN and they'll help determine if you can use the image. Be Safe 💙🦋
May 11, 2025 at 4:34 AM
parkwaysprojects.bsky.social
Here's another fairly good neg. I began finding these "root" bridges early on my journeys into #NPS troves of images. Totally random. Words on these works in ALTtext.
#SmokyMountainsNP #EastCoastKin
#Clemson #OpenParksNetwork archives. It's a collaboration: #ClemsonUniversity & #NationalParksService
Handbuilt lean-to with nothing to lean on. Slate walk across timbers and split-shake shingles. Nice build. I'll never walk over this bridge, no matter how hard I search for it; no matter what amount of time I invest in trying to locate it. I doubt, maybe 100 years later, that it still exists, considering it's construction. Most likely it was a passage between properties above a branch, or maybe a spring (which I sort of considered in naming it as you might guess) but the predominant feature I'm enamored by is that it seems to be paved with slabs of slate. Think on this. Why? Not just for resilience. not just for stability, nor just to anchor the footfall portion of the bridge. But for shade. For what is immediately below. Consider the coolness of slate on your back were you to lie upon it. Was it possibly used for collecting crawdads, salamanders or even wearied trout? The shake shingles... more for humans than wildlife I'd surmise. A meeting place for neighbors? Or a spot for a well-tended nap? or a look at the Moon in a private hollow? But most of all, a garden, just downstream of the flow, if indeed it is by a spring. It looks more to be an herb garden, or possibly a few edibles for later in the season. A bridge in the middle of a wilderness long forgotten by those who sought to share it. Even though I doubt I'd see the structure (one never knows, though, I've found) I really want to go up there and GPS the location. The Civilian Conservation Corp and NPS would give compass coordinates on each site they surveyed, record, photographed. Why? I think there will be a spring there, and most likely there was a shallow spring pool. I'm an advocate of trying things.
January 28, 2025 at 10:03 PM
parkwaysprojects.bsky.social
Just a peek so y'all can see what I'm doing with this particular images. They are all in the Public Domain & in the #Clemson #OpenParksNetwork archives. It's a collaboration: #ClemsonUniversity & #NationalParksService

They scan everything, so when I saw this neg; I went to work to see what it was 🔬
A picture is worth a thousand words. This is what’s called a "thin negative." I'd call it über-thin. I really am hoping that the Clemson archival librarians have continued the practice of scanning everything the National Park Service sends them! I've been a photoshop aficianado since I received a blank CD in the mail in January 1996, a fellow artist who was also a Mac user like me. All of my digital work in Photoshop is "organically injected,” organically proffered to the incredible infinity of creativity Photoshop allows us. I am also a heartfelt fan of old photographic prints, starting when I was a child. Most of those were throwaways passed on to me by older relatives. Usually they were so faded from light leaching the silver nitrates that there was little to learn & discern from them. In 1997 I decided to try "recovering" some of those. They were rather crude efforts, but promised something, as long as I fed the digital appetites of the program designers! Like making offerings to the gods in days of old. "In the Year 2000..." (please insert Andy Richter's intonations for vibe) I tackled three family photos that we all called "the Ghost photographs." Recovering print images is more difficult than negatives but who ever had negatives from those old wandering photographer’s works left through the countrysides? As the internet emerged in 1992, I was curious about archives nationwide. I tried to find any that had negatives, glass plates & the like. As the years progressed, they began to trickle up, but for only a meager selection of negatives. I need to remind everyone of a fact that matters: I'm a painter. Full bore, classic post-modernist painter & I'm a multi-disciplinary artist now. All the merging began in college, with photography, printmaking & ceramics classes. In 1996, I took my first step into the Digital World. It's an alternate universe; has been that since 1996. By 2005, I had a broad array of media in my heart and mind. Just so you know :)
January 28, 2025 at 6:32 PM