Andrew Wittkop
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awestfell.bsky.social
Andrew Wittkop
@awestfell.bsky.social
800 followers 600 following 180 posts
books, photography, place

THE SPIRIT AND THE DUST forthcoming from Belt Publishing
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awestfell.bsky.social
Last glow of the evening sun.
Old two story commercial building, faded yellow brick. It features an assortment of doors and windows, fire escape, and a carport cut below the right corner of the second floor, occupied only by an old couch.
August 15, 2025 at 2:29 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
Overcast sky gray with rain and haze. In the distance, a patch of open water centers a wetland fringed with green. Farm buildings and trees are discernible on the hazy horizon. Though it looks like mist, your nose will tell you that the haze is in fact smoke from a distant wildfire, blown in with the rain, an ominous play on the senses.
June 3, 2025 at 8:32 PM
awestfell.bsky.social
Nightingale, by W. J. Neatby (1899).
Color illustration of a lone dark bird singing in a flowering tree. A path leads from the foreground through a meadow of yellow and blue wildflowers. A grove of large leafy trees stands in the middle ground, their crowns enveloping the top of the frame. The path continues below the canopy of the great trees, leading to a meadow on the horizon. 1899 illustration by W. J. Neatby (1860-1910) from A Day with Keats: With numerous coloured illustrations by May Clarissa Gillington Byron and illustrations by W. J. Neatby. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913. From Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
May 28, 2025 at 2:02 PM
awestfell.bsky.social
Hello
Back of little green tree frog perched on pagoda dogwood leaf.
May 26, 2025 at 12:43 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
leaving the shadow
A patch of snow partially obscured by the shadow of a mailbox. The snow forms a crude outline of the box, white dissolved into the brown grass by spring sun, edges splattered like spilled milk. The snow protected by shadow takes on a purple cast, while the grass seems to disappear into the darkness.
March 31, 2025 at 10:25 PM
awestfell.bsky.social
“Books still deserve respect, he said once, even in this hopeless world.” -Christine Lai, Landscapes, a book I profoundly enjoyed.
Photo of Landscapes by Christine Lai, a novel published by Two Dollar Radio. The white cover depicts a woman in an art gallery, standing before a landscape painting of a valley, which has been digitally manipulated. The book rests on a rusted iron box melting out of the snow, revealing dead leaves. A portion of the evergreen branch of a white cedar hangs to the upper right. Gorgeous, elegiac, stunning, Lai’s novel weaves ekphrasis, memory, and the specter of ecological collapse to confront difficult, at times deeply unsettling questions about art, wealth, violence, and disintegration. Speaks profoundly to our moment while transcending it in a way that only the most enduring writing can. Can’t recommend enough. A few more of my favorite quotes: “But loss is unaffected by repetition or experience. Each loss is a fresh cut. And each process of healing subject to its own vagaries and setbacks. I know the reproduction for what it is—a copy—but sometimes, if I dim the lights, I can fool myself into thinking nothing was ever lost.” “Dad spoke of how the delicate blades of grass also evoked a sense of forgetting, like the grass that grows over battlefields.” “...the body, vanishing into nature where everything changes and shifts, is a reminder of impermanence and its promise of liberation.”
March 8, 2025 at 9:19 PM
awestfell.bsky.social
way home
Yellow sunset over bare fields waiting for spring. A low bank of stratiform clouds, split by a band of fibrous light, obscures the sun, while a higher deck of cumulus blots white and shade into fading blue. A dark a line of hills, bare groves, and a farm mark the horizon. Following a gravel road on the right, the faint trace of a power line cuts a fifth of sky, as if the clouds had begun to glitch.
February 26, 2025 at 2:17 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
Today is Terminalia, the festival of Terminus, Roman god of boundaries, whose credo CONCEDO NVLLI ("I yield to no one") I offer without comment.

Photo by Humphrey Bolton, 2013 (Wikimedia Commons)
Old boundary stone marked with capital 'R', leaning into a grassy hillside above a little valley, partially obscured by mist. From Wikimedia Commons. "Boundary stone, Turvin Clough" by Humphrey Bolton, 2013. CC 2.0
February 23, 2025 at 4:24 PM
awestfell.bsky.social
Frost smoke at -11F/-24C.
Frost smoke (steam fog) rises from river at night, lit by floodlight, passing double arch bridge with string lights along rail, and small buildings along the far bank of the river.
January 21, 2025 at 3:52 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
everything’s fine here’s a puppet show
January 8, 2025 at 4:38 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
Margaret Watkins, Untitled (Bridge at Canaan, Connecticut), 1919.
Black and white photo of a couple, backs to camera, one dressed in white, the other in a long black coat, walking along a path near a river. Trees fringe the water, a low hill rises on the distant horizon. The scene is framed wooden bridge trestles, between which the path curves into the foreground.
January 6, 2025 at 1:31 PM
awestfell.bsky.social
chasing the light
Sunset on snowy horizon. Gravel road curves to left, dropping into a little valley. Sunset at break in clouds on treed horizon. Pink highlights in clouds. Snowy fields in the foreground, two deer discernible in right the middle distance. Sunset over snowy gravel road, yellow curve sign stands to right just above horizon. Two dead conifer trees in yellow-orange flames in dark snowy woods.
December 22, 2024 at 3:17 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
breccia
Brecciated texture in lake ice. Lighter, cloudier ice to the left; darker, clearer ice to the right. Decimeter-scale blocks of dark ice are frozen into a matrix of light ice. In the distance, patches of wet snow adhere to the dark ice. A forested island looms on the horizon of the overcast sky.
December 15, 2024 at 11:10 PM
awestfell.bsky.social
Testing new ice.
Afternoon sun reflecting on newly frozen lake. Reaching out to low wooded hills on the horizon, dendritic crystals in greenish snow speckled ice, lens flare to the margins above and below.
December 1, 2024 at 12:27 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
Autochrome images of Canada and Norway, from Archives de la Planète, 1910-1926.
Sunset, the sky yellow blue fringed by clouds on the far images. Everything below the horizon is black, the silhouette of a building discernible to the left. From the center left and verging to the foreground on the right, a line of power poles strung with eight sets of wire, hardly distinguishable against the sky. Photo by Frédéric Gadmer, taken in Canada, 28 April, 1926. A two track road bends to the right as it descends into a valley. Fringed by gray stone walls both sides, a line of haystacks each about 3 m tall, stands behind the stone wall to the right of the road. In the distance, farm buildings, the pointed forms of spruce trees, and the gray hulk of a stony mountain streaked with white near its summit, which is barely discernible from the white mist of the heavans. Photo by Auguste Léon, captured 6 September, 1910, Près de Saaheim, Norway. A dirt road across rocky ground, gray boulders strewn to the right, a large boulder or ledge rises to the left. Grass grows in the foreground, small trees dot the landscape, and a clump of three or four birches, barren of leaves, stands to the right of the road at the crest of a low rise. A gray sky hovers over a backdrop of irregular terrain, low hills mottled in dark green and gray. Photo by Auguste Léon, captured 5 September, 1910, Près de Rjukan, Norway. A young woman stands on a stone. She faces left and wears a long black dress with a white apron. Her head is in motion. Little else can be discerned as she stands before a fading sun over a barren valley, all enveloped in shadow, a sky streaked with cloud reflected in water fringed by dark trees tapering off into the far reaches of the valley. Photo by Auguste Léon, captured 8 September, 1910, Près de Dalen, Norway.
November 17, 2024 at 5:13 PM
awestfell.bsky.social
Yellow horizon of fading sun seen through a small grove of oaks reaching into the blue. A two-track gravel road, light gray, threads through the oaks, into the foreground of prairie and the longing shadow of the night.
September 27, 2024 at 9:45 PM
awestfell.bsky.social
after the equinox
Just past sunset, yellow glow above a line of dark hardwoods on the horizon. In the foreground, a gravel path bends to the left as it tracks down hill, surrounded by a prairie turned to seed, stems of indian grass standing above the dense thatch, as if reaching for the light.
September 24, 2024 at 3:01 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
During the equinox my thoughts called back, strangely it seemed, to that Sunday morning in Sonthofen a day or two after the summer Solstice, and the sound of church bells through the balcony window, over a quiet city refreshed by the previous night’s rain.
An early morning view from a balcony over Sonthofen, a Bavarian village. Partly cloudy, patches of blue. Below, backs of apartment houses, rooftops, a narrow view of a street. On the horizon, a church steeple; more distant, the purple form of a flat-topped mountain.
September 23, 2024 at 12:40 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
Photo of bay, evening light and parting rain clouds.
May 29, 2024 at 11:15 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
Bronze plaque with list of individuals depicted in the mural, by number.
May 11, 2024 at 2:10 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
Detail of lower left of mural with artist info. Jason Ruhland JTMural.com 2007, Charlene M Weeks 2016.
May 11, 2024 at 2:07 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
Centennial Mural, Glenwood City, WI
Color mural painted on side of historical brick building. The mural depicts prominent places, events, and citizens of the town through time, more recent events to to the right, including a fire about one-third of the way through the town’s history.
May 11, 2024 at 2:04 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
off grid
A photo of an old electrical socket, fuse box, steel switch box, and steel conduit for wire, all connected to each other, laying on greening grass in sun cut by shadows of tree trunks and barren branches.
April 14, 2024 at 3:02 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
Painting of Franciscan martyrs, late 18th century (?), artist unknown. Their killing is depicted in the background.

On display at the New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe.

#history #painting #NewMexico #Arizona
Painting depicting two late 18th century Franciscan friars. They are dressed in long drab robes and face each other, heads bowed. They have close cropped dark hair. They are bleeding from wounds on their heads. In the background between them, the painter depicted a group of Native American men with dark skin and wearing white undergarments, beating the friars to death with long sticks. An inscription in Spanish is below the friars.
April 1, 2024 at 12:22 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
February 23 is Terminalia, an ancient Roman festival celebrating the minor deity Terminus, depicted here as a boundary marker carved with a bust.

#Terminalia #Terminus
16th century illustration “Design for a Stained Glass Window with Terminus”, in pen, ink, and watercolor by Hans Holbein the Younger. A slab of stone is suspended in an archway above the bust. The motto “concedo nulli”, inscribed in the background, translates to “I concede to no one”, said to originate “from the myth of Terminus, who refused to cede his place on Capitoline Hill to Jupiter.” (Wikipedia)
February 23, 2024 at 3:47 PM