Experience of Nature
Doreen Lindsay
October 18 to November 28, 1996
| For Doreen Lindsay, photographing nature is an act of meditation as well as a plea for conservation. During recent travels to the coast of California, she would wander along a rocky shoreline or hike through an old-growth forest until she found a site that she felt was imbued with a strong spiritual presence. Then she would sit or walk around quietly for awhile. "I need to experience a place before I can photograph it," she says, "and I always look for indigenous plants." |
Once Lindsay felt ready to photograph, she would often kneel or lie on the ground in order to be level with her subject. She composed carefully with her old square-format camera, balancing dark and light forms and throwing parts of her subject into soft-focus. Upon her return home, she made archival black-and-white prints and then used a traditional technique to hand-colour them with transparent oil colours. |
| The resulting images reflect the intimacy of her contact with nature and reveal beauty and meaning in the humble elements so many of us overlook—a tangle of trees, a rock with a deep fissure running through it, grasses sculpted by the wind into a wave. |
| Although Lindsay concentrated on close-ups and medium-distance views
of nature, she did not exclude the human presence altogether. "Every
place I go, I make one photograph with my shadow in it, " she explains. "I
feel strongly about the philosophy of living with the land instead of exploiting
it. We need to learn to be in wild places and co exist with them."
Louise Abbott, 1996 |
Doreen Lindsay was born in Tillsonburg and grew up in London,Ontario.
While studying art at Bealteck, she was awarded a scholarship to study
painting in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Returning to Canada, she moved
to Montreal where she continued to paint and began to teach. |
