Arts Design

BEAUTIFUL LEAVES AS BOTH ARTIST & MEDIUM NOW

Deciduous leaves illustrate circular motion, with tender chartreuse springtime sprouts, growing to frank full-on summer greens, bidding bright farewells in fall, and withering to ghostly brown remains that crunch their way, in decay, back into winter’s ground.

Check out the works of two phenomenal artists who celebrate the natural circles of leaves, each with a distinctive fresh drama and riveting style.

KACPER KOWALKSI

Kacper Kowalski is a perfect storm: a pilot, and architect, and a photographer, all rolled up into one. He uses all of his credentials and talents to create the most amazing aerial photography.

Today, we are featuring Kowalski’s aerial fall foliage images. Like many of Kowalski’s works the patterns, symmetries and graphic compositions are what set them apart.

Kowalski controls both the planes and the cameras he uses, so he can really hone his compositions, speed and lighting, getting them to execute perfectly on his spectacular vision.

In these photos, Kowalski surveys two lakes and their surroundings in northern Poland, observing them from up on high in the sky as the seasons change. These autumn scenes are particularly compelling to us right now as we are more attuned to the beauty of the colored leaves on the trees that ring the lakes and stretch out across the land.

Kowalski has won numerous prestigious awards, including the World Press Photo award, National Geographic Photography Award, Pilsner Urquell International Photography Award (IPA), Sony World Photography Award, Picture of the Year International (POYi), and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award.

If you’d like to purchase one of his prints, you can do so at the Leica Gallery Warsaw and 6x7art . Check out Kacper Kowaslki’s website for more about him and his work.

ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

British sculptor, photographer and passionate environmentalist, Andy Goldsworthy, OBE, uses leaves as his key medium, to create site-specific land-art that puts a new perspective in play on cycles and circles.

Goldsworthy collects leaves, flowers, and other organics materials and arranges them around a circular core, in round frames. The center circles of his works evoke eyes, holes in time, black holes, portals, windows in space and other disc-shaped realities, while the leaves, ironic in their ephemeral nature, anchor us.

“The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within,” say Goldsworthy. The works are temporary. The leaves are real. Nothing is glued down or preserved other than through the art of photography.

Goldsworthy photographs his own pieces, both to document their brief existence and because it is the only way to share their beauty since few people have ever seen the live installations.

"I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue."

Goldsworthy is the current A.D. White Professor-At-Large at Cornell University, while he resides mainly in Scotland. His installations have graced spots all over the world, including an awesome piece at the North Pole.

Read more about Beautiful Leaves, as they relate to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact including Contemplating Leaves Now, Good, Good, Good, Leaf Vibrations Now, and Beautiful Artisan Tea Leaves Now.

Enter your own images and ideas about Beautiful Leaves in this week’s creative Photo Competition. Open for entries now until 11:59 p.m. PT on 10.26.14. If you are reading this after that date, check out the current BN Creative Competition, and enter!