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Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

🌙 'Palisade over Drake,' #pastel A #pleinair work done back in October 1997 on Bobcat Ridge, Colorado.

Hey everybody! I'm hard at work, up against a deadline, but will be back soon!

##nature #RockyMountains #RockinTuesday #EastCoastKin #Artsyear

A pastel painting done on site near Drake Colorado in 1997. The scene is of Palisade Mountain, with an old hollow tree in the foreground, a living pine on the right, with rocky outcroppings in the middle ground and the peaks of Palisade in the background. Colors are a brilliant blue sky behind a gray-gold rocky peak and outcroppings, and a golden tall grass field

I’d knocked out my original note at bottom years back on Photoshop so you didn’t see the words anymore. Until I found this scan just now, I’d logged it in my head that this was drawn up around Pike’s Peak

August 27, 2025 at 4:00 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

🌙🦉🪔 Exhale #DigitalCollage #Photography #Hybrids
#ArtYear #EastCoastKin #SensoryArt #Vintage
#smArtist #Internalization #ContemporaryTuesday

“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear."

#WilliamShakespeare

"I have not slept. Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection."

≈ William Shakespeare

A woman is seated on an overstuffed chair, her head back as though asleep, golden hair shimmering in the low sunlight of a fading winter's day in November 2003. However, she is not sleeping but in deep thought about the events of her day, her views on life and her place within it. An image, part of a compilation of shots for a future series on gods, humans, vanished peoples, titans and humans. The colors are muted browns, a touch of lavender on either side of her head, so much in turmoil from from the news of changes, and drifting liabilities. She had just said, "If I was to have a dream it would be to get away from everything and disappear."

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

≈ William Shakespeare

June 11, 2025 at 3:36 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

22 small panels as a start, having driven back to SC in the fall of 2017 for my mother had died. Arriving Oct 1 to find me without a place to stay; family had altered course. But that's another story.

22 Starts at the farm in North, SC #Hybrids #Painting #Bluesky🦋 #Stunday in terms of reality 🌙🦉

There's at least 22 small wooden panels spread across a canvas-covered heart pine table in a farmhouse in North, South Carolina, on October 2nd, 2017. A dear friend had offered me a place to stay to weather the storm.

I had brought 60 sanded wood panels in a box with me in back of my Jeep. Along with a large box of paints, brushes & other studio gear. I started 30 of them that week. Five larger ones were situated on the kitchen counter out of sight of this shot. I took my time on all of them, for there were other events occurring that took precedence over making art. And in that delicate dance something came to be, in & of itself. Fluid collages, hybrid digitals. Attenuated vintage photographs of my own people yearning for their stories to be told. My Mom's three computers, only awaiting accessing based on her batteries of passwords.

Then, at North, South Carolina, I began to lay panels out in the daytime under a large outdoor shed, abut 20x40 feet, until night-time & the mosquitos of October would alight, instructing me inside the farmhouse.

I became the norm. I traveled the course of my families' existences; photographing them along the way. Buildings fallen in, barns rotting on the ground. Houses deteriorating in the town I had grown up in and around.

There is nothing if not the anguish of memories lost to stir the crucible of creativity.

But not now, seven years later.

In the two years & two months I stayed in South Carolina, I had begun 28 hard-copy, analog, traditional paintings on cradle wood panels. By the time I left I was workin on over 140 digital hybrid works, mainly due to circumstances & a greater affinity for what digital allowed.

Necessity is the mother of invention & my own Mother had developed quite a rapport with Necessity throughout her life.

We are nothing if not the sum of our parts.

June 9, 2025 at 1:32 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

🌙 A Dieselpunk sunset #TomOgburn #Photography #Landscape #ArtYear #EastCoastKin
#BlueSkyArtShow #Vibrant

Smoke & contrails in the Sky above Lake Marion Oh My!

“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.” ≈ Pat Conroy 'The Prince of Tides'

A quiet day on the placid waters of Lake Marion saw the skies rent asunder with chortling, churning noises, a fire across the lake spewing smoke into the upper atmosphere in a westerly direction, producing a great Smoke Phoenix to spread its wings to signal, "This is not just another ordinary day."

Low rumbling thunder was noted as well, but no lightning in the vicinity of sight save for low wavelengths in the farthest distances. Sirens added to the surreal nature of this scene, which cast another brilliant golden sunset claiming a third of the sky but contained by the turquoise blue above, rather than a deep pressing midnight blue of a falling night. All sounds were heightened by crackling cold air.

You are looking more at the edge of the shoreline of Santee proper, across the lake, more so than the actual causeway. It too, was just as grand and scattershot.

We don't have Lake Woebegones in the Modern South, much to my chagrin. I could use a little peace, quiet and what use to pass for relative sanity.

“Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary” ≈ Pat Conroy 'My Losing Season: A Memoir'

June 8, 2025 at 3:51 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

Blue sky, green tin & weeds #Photography #TomOgburn
#Urban #Rural #MinimalistMonday #BlueSkyMonday #ArtYear #EastCoastKin

"Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks." #RolandBarthes

⬇️4ALT

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” ≈ Mark Twain

I learned years ago that at times being an artist means bearing down and "living lean," as my old friend TR Ritchie used to say, who was a fine singer-songwriter, poet, and writer of scenarios on the snippets of an artist's existence if one stayed the course.

And so three years in Carbon county passed, with my photographs becoming much more attuned to all of the above. In time the beauty of the leanness began to emerge, and the awkward nature of all things just trying to survive in such an environment became more and more the script which fed my work.

The railyard was a river of change usually six to 15 times a day. Just to walk alongside the tracks was a story, the chapters chock full of subjects within each ten yards of foot travel.

Often then, there was that light, from the other side of the World which deemed to visit that town with the bowl of dun, gray, and black colored reefs and escarpments.

No matter how we live, as artists, our works need to thrive, even when things are ruthlessly lean.

"For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood." ≈ Roland Barthes

May 27, 2025 at 2:21 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

Wrought, dun, and coal, from 'Rainy Courtyard' series #Photography #TomOgburn #Urban #Streetscape
#MinimalistMonday #ArtYear #EastCoastKin

"What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?" ≈ Thomas Merton

⬇️4ALT

"What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous." ≈ Thomas Merton

An old brick wall made of dun and dark bluish gray bricks, all dating from the turn of the 20th century, these circa 1918-1925. The dark gray ones were the only brick used to build the interior walls of the building I rented there in Helper those three years. The long side walls, and the 18 foot back wall, all built from those specific brick. For they were inexpensive back then because they were made from lower grade coal produced from the mines in Helper. They came from the Union Pacific Rail Yard just 30 yards in back of this, my unit's courtyard. Hauled just a short distance by hopper cars into town, named Helper as it was a Helper Engine Rail Yard at the top of the mountain to aid the trains on either elevation with extra engines to haul the long coal trains.

Then, the waste coal would by ingenious magic be mixed into very low-fire brick. The Union Pacific made money. The Coal mine owners made more money. The businesses paid high company rents for a coal brick unit. The dull yellow dun color is also under-fired, again, a cost-saving procedure back in the 1900-1920 era.

There were only two disadvantages to these two very odd cost saving choices: neither kind of brick was strong. Most cracked and crumbled, spalling off into the interiors of the buildings for their lifetimes, and the coal brick, being low-fired, would burn like...well, coal.

There is a modern but very rusted steel stairway up to the second floor units, with a modern but also rusted steel-mesh floor. Here you can see a section of the scrap mesh used by the owner of the building to try to shore up the old wall. The repair methods made for an interesting pastiche of character in the courtyard.

They are 60% dun clay, 40% coal.

Ingenious, indeed.

May 27, 2025 at 12:17 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

At play in the field of the Goblins #Photography
#TomOgburn #Stunday #EastCoastKin #ArtYear

A rather stunning slab of concrete.

“We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect..." the rest of this quote in within the ALT text...🌙🦉

⬇️4ALT

This is a photograph hearkening towards one of my favorite artists of the 20th Century, Aaron Siskind. Definitely considered a street photographer, his work would prove to be some of the most sublimely gritty abstractions the World of Art has ever known. Yet, the sublime was always present. A quirky sense of humor was often spied lurking amidst the detritus of his surfaces. At other times, a regal and quiet charm.

“We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs. If you look very intensely and slowly, things will happen that you never dreamed of before.” ≈ Aaron Siskind

This flat sidewalk section of concrete too heavily laden with fly-ash, thus making the section too light, too fragile to withstand the footsteps of coal miners in the place it came from, eluded my notice for two years, due to an obscured location. A long dead leaf soaked in the dead ash when the concrete was poured and was mummified, but left in a fragile state. I photographed it for almost an hour—just hours before it was tossed into the back of a city dump truck for its own trip to oblivion.

"Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability." ≈ Susan Sontag

May 26, 2025 at 3:19 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

#SelfPortraitSunday #Photography #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Cityscape #Stunday

Prompt: #OnTheEdge

2021, both Covid's debut & the Bear Fire all around Helper for 96 days straight. My location? The town's only liquor store, with very old signage I loved.

North American rampant fires now 33 years 🦉😰🔥

In 2021, standing before the classically aged, crackled and crazed sign from the early 1970's, while the Bear Fire is raging two miles from a town still comprised of 65% dried out wooden stores and buildings mostly circa 1900-1940; wall-to-wall like the Old West.

I had just relocated there, and for the first time in all my life, everything I owned, my entire body of work, tools, supplies, were all with me in that town. In a matchstick building erected in 1924, desiccated and walls made of 70% clay, 30% ground coal, for it was so plentiful there a the turn of the century.

We were lucky in Helper that year; the fire never made it into town, but lingered at the edge three times for days on end. Thanks to the Herculean efforts by our town, local, state and regional firefighters, and FEMA's help for those in the rural areas who did sustain fire damage, a catastrophe was averted.

I've lived in the Northwest, the Southwest, and the Southeast all of my life. Fires in the Southeast were fairly common, and often burned thousands and thousands of timberlands. Even in the Northwest, fires were growing in number and length of burn. By 1998, the Southwest I visited was often burning on my arrival and afire still on my departure.

And today? My heart and mind is breaking at the losses our World is be made toendure. The crimes of complicity which have now become manifold each time we experience a natural disaster of any kind. Western North Carolina is still devastated; our State and National Parks defunded and gutted of human resources and financial support.

We are truly, truly on the edge of oblivion.

One doesn't always plan what they say. This World has Gone Upside Down.

May 26, 2025 at 2:22 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

Aurora's Sentinel aka de Chelly #DigitalCollage
#TomOgburn #DigitalHybrid #Illustration
#Stundayc#EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Photoshop

“Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose” ≈ Mary Shelley

🧵⬇️4ALT

Today I'll write this quickly between the words of Mary Wallstonecraft Shelley. A very subdued work, a study in texture, both real & digital. The surround is a photo of a very old & weathered concrete slab, once part of a sidewalk in Helper, Utah. It's an illustration made of five photos, including the slab. The image is very muted colors resembling a daguerreotype, with a hint of gold. The rocks & structure are comprised of two different landscapes in the Arizona high deserts.

"Aurora's Sentinel aka de Chelly," a Digital Hybrid I've been working on since the mid-nineties through a Canon 35mm SLR to a tiny Canon A5 point & shoot. Intermediaries like a Nikon 35mm film & slide scanner, a very large Epson scanner that has figured prominently in my years, a small flat bed Canon office scanner I use for grunged-up captures. Then, lots of sand, gravel, weeds, grasses, seeds & such.

This work has been drafted, drawn & quartered in my head now for 39 years. I've finally finished the first full hybridization of the two photographs I've had circling inside my head like two 18th century cast iron ponies on a rumbling carousel. Or like two sequential dreams entwined by circumstances from the Way Back Machine. Events made it necessary to finish it this weekend.

Something here now brought to Life again from alien constituent parts by me, much like Shelly's Doctor Frankenstein. He was created in her mind on a cold, dark, humid, and frigid night in Cologny, Switzerland, 1816. The year Tambora erupted and layered the Earth in a winter which lasted until the next winter. Mary Shelley had lost a parent, and a child by that year.

This image, an homage to Aaron Siskind. I'll post the original image I made that wintry day in Helper, Utah, after staring at that section of concrete yanked from its bed of decades & left akilter against an old building in far worse shape. I almost missed it.

It's to be my 1st substack post tomorrow, with far more words.

May 26, 2025 at 12:33 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

3️⃣🛤️ the idea of suites of photos be offered on same subjects or micro-locales, such as a suite of about 40 photographs selected out of over 900 photos made of my utterly unique Helper rail-side back courtyard. Like this one, "Unhinged—Unfettered' #photography #ArtYear #TomOgburn

"He stood at the gateway between two worlds, at the place where imagination passed into creation." ≈ Michael Bedard

Handmade doors from circa 1912. Check out the hinge. These are very old doors crafted by hand. They stood inside the courtyard for the entire three years I was there, in all kinds of weather. The image is a close-up of the edges of three very thick wood doors, laminated layer by layer with rough-cut nails

It is from the 'Rainy Courtyard' works. Silent and lean, slow running, under the radar parabolic mode...I still keep adding to it, as, well, it keeps raining. Which is a very, very good thing with a series title like that in the high desert of Utah.

"Unhinged—Unfettered," digital photograph, from the 'Rainy Courtyard' works, a new thing. A new beat, a new place of being. These shots are turning out to be a few more than I expected to continue with.

"A very little key will open a very heavy door." ≈ Charles Dickens

May 14, 2025 at 6:22 PM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

Charcoal Sky #photography #TomOgburn #ArtYear
2001 Helper, Utah.
⬇️4ALT

There is a town in central Utah. Most of my changes in three years I was there. But this is an image made in 2001, 20 years before I moved to Helper Utah, an "arts town" on the verge of "happening" in May of 2021. The structures you see here were still well cared for, in 2001. Either by the town, Carbon county, or the Railroad. It's hard to say who would have cared more, or less. But it was beautiful on this day. Probably made during the monsoon season, for only then (after having lived there for three years) for then is the drama of sky splayed against the Earth and our buildings, our bridges, our trestles.

It is an eerie reflection, to know, upon every walk up to this part of town, I never saw something as beautiful as this scene. For it no longer existed by 2021. Whether, again, the town, county, or railroad is responsible for this manifold crossroad (I expect it’s all three) the ugliness of the scene was heartbreaking.

I did shoot some photos here, often enough, actually, to have caught something appealing. I do have a few I plan to use in the 'America: Lost & Found' series, as that which is lost. For even in degradation there is beauty. But nothing like this sense of being, sustained within the 1990's, actually when a small town, a small coal mining town, took pride in its facade. I've thought of using this image as a root base for an "America: Lost & Found" work...but at this point, I have to smile, and reflect on the fact that it was not yet lost in 2001, but still held to a stolid and placid beauty. I’ll never use this image as a ‘A::&F’ base, but will use it as a Hybrid work, exhibiting its strength of purpose and beauty.

May 13, 2025 at 11:42 PM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

Pecos Study. #photography #TomOgburn

A 1950's model Studebaker pickup, painted the requisite blue which was offered back then, parked on the main drag of Pecos New Mexico, shot from the from the left front fender looking back into the clear #Bluesky🦋 of his home town.

I wish I could say what year and model but I cannot, for it was before my time. Perhaps not before George Adelos' time though, for I had the feeling George presaged me on this Earth.

This is a view from the north side of town looking south, an old Studebaker pickup truck, most likely a 1950's model, lovingly restored and repaired to near perfection, as George was want to do, in Pecos, New Mexico in 2011.

I did not know anyone there upon arrival. But I discovered the Hummingbird Cafe in my second week there, and tried to figure out their actual schedule for being opened. George was the grandson of the original owners of the Adelo's Mercantile (at this location) where they also lived out the rich and varied life they shared with all around them through all their years. Their cash register, their refrigeration units for prepared foods, all played a role as supporting actors for my eye and my camera for the two years I lived in Glorieta, NM just up old Route 66 about 12 miles. There was nothing in Glorieta save homes except for the Post Office which was shut down the second year I was there.

But the Hummingbird, and Canela's Restaurant, between this location and my home on Cur Trail, proved to be liasons for me to meet new people, new views to Life, new souls along the way. George being one of them. George was a lawyer (a damned good one), an entrepreneur, and a man who love his heritage and his family. He was a character, and deservedly so. He was a founding member of the band "White Buffalo," a solid presence in Northern New Mexico. Their drummer died of a heart attack on stage one day at a festival. A couple of years later George died from complications of a brown recluse spider bite.

Pecos. Land of Enchantment. And it was that.

May 13, 2025 at 10:18 PM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

Eunice's Dreams of Laurel and Cornflowers #TomOgburn #DigitalCollage #Hybrids #photography #collage #ArtYear

🦉This one is still in process, so, a WIP. It's the way I move through the Hybrid works, this being the first time I've warped it over into digital mode from the original collage 🌙

⬇️4ALT 🧵⬇️

The image above is almost square, and is the first digital rendering of a collage I posted about a month back, which I'll try to locate and post a link to it again in comments below. You'll notice the depth of field and colors have changed, this being somewhat more muted than the original physical (analog) collage and painting, which is about 8 by 9 inches on wood panel. It too, however, is not quite done.

There's a small photographic image of a young woman in the digital collage above, dating from 1954. There's also an Ace of Hearts playing card, with an illustration of a Southern Nettle tree in the center, with a sprig of three leaves to show us their form. Various sizes of cornflower blooms are surrounding the young woman in the photo. A larger close-up of her faced is superimposed, very softly as from a dream across the entire live image area. Leaves of a Southern Nettle, from a vintage landscape photograph made by one of the CCC photographers working inside The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, circa 1945, crown he head of her enlargement. There is a small skeleton dancing between the photograph of Eunice and the Ace of Hearts playing card.

There are many, many layers applied in both the original analog collage, as well as the digital collage here. The colors are pale tans and creams, subdued lavenders, blues, lavenders and greens.

If you feel almost as though you're being read your future by a fortune teller, then thank you, for that is how I decided to write these words of this alt text. The more I worked on this image, the more the feel of an old, mid-20th century seance emerged. Once I felt that, it began to inform the way I developed this digital hybrid work.

For Art is a transmission, and viewing is a reception 🪔

May 6, 2025 at 5:22 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

Her waning Lunal storm #TomOgburn #DigitalCollage #Hybrids #photography #collage #blueskymonday #rockintuesday #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #surreal
⬇️4ALT

I've been working up a new Hybrid build for the last few weeks. Experimenting at almost ever turn and curve. That's the beauty of digital; no waiting for the paint to dry.

This is a very subdued, very subtle image, akin to the Occlusion works I've been doing for years now, save for it being much more subject oriented than a pushed abstraction, almost to non-objective realms. This one has a woman's form, her back to you as the viewer, in a very dark, nocturnal environment. I've implied rock clusters, as one would see in the mountains, ahead of her as she walks slowly, purposefully into the misty darkness. Is she a dryad? A ghost? A banshee? You probably would not want to follow her unless you're the extremely curious soul. Her hands are raised and reaching ahead of her, as though she is feeling her way through the miasmic darkness, the Moon barely discernible in the upper left of the sky.

The colors are a deep blue-violet night sky, punctuated by a field of subdued golden sparks about her co-mingling with the fog.

There's a faint border on right and left, framing the vertical sides of the image. The title is "Her waning Lunal storm," which hopefully implies even more of a mystery to her presence.

May 6, 2025 at 4:18 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

Alt self portrait #TomOgburn #DigitalCollage #Hybrids
#photography #collage #HumansOfBluesky #EastCoastKin #ArtYear
⬇️4ALT

You’re looking at a man in his mid 50’s. If it seems muted & browning, it is a duotone image in deep yellow ochre & dark walnut brown. Not quite black. The man is reaching for something out of the right side of the image. His eyes are cut hard to one side. Part of a framed work of art & his most often used CD rack frames the right side. The left side is framed by two paintings, on the wall behind. The year is not 1860, 1888, or 1918. It dates all the way back to 2010. I know all these facts to be true as he was me once.

I remember the day I was meddling around in Photoshop as October 10th, working on one if my newest Human Grid pieces, which was quickly morphing into something new by synaptic osmosis. I was ramping up the detail, planning to finally build a narrative around all the images I’d made from November 2002 through October 2010, when Photoshop glitched. It does that often enough. Enough to annoy. But this time, the gremlin caught my eye.

I halted my workflow, backed up on my history, then looked at my layers. 17. History was also at 17. I remember thinking how odd that was & wondered if the numbers colluded to create the glitch. I flipped a few layers about & saw interesting elemental changes. I took screenshots, wrote down the settings, zoomed in on my history & layers & took one last screenshot. I then decided to get a desk cam shot of me. I’d fiddle around with it that night.

I began work on the self portrait around 7 pm; I had this image done by 11:30. I was trying to get it finished to send to a friend on her birthday that night. It became the progenitor of both the “Beaufain Studio” and later, the “Virtual Palladium” series. I began making the Beaufain works that week. I had been shooing for the Virtual Palladium idea for 11 months. It wasn’t until later I decided my methods & techniques for toning.

I found this today while looking for another Virtual Palladium work. I thought it might be of interest as to how things sometimes start.

May 2, 2025 at 3:06 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

Betzére #TomOgburn #DigitalCollage #Hybrids
#photography #collage #HumansOfBluesky #EastCoastKin #ArtYear
⬇️4ALT

'Betzere,' from the 'Studio Beaufain' series of portraits of the models and muses who worked with me for 10 years in Charleston, South Carolina. This was shot in the sunroom of my Beaufain Street studio, up on the third floor, a wall of old Craftsman windows on three sides, with Colonial Lake just below. The light in the sunroom was incredible!

The image is of a woman seated cross-legged, her arms crossed, almost entwined around her knees.

This photograph was made with a little Canon A5 camera, one of the first digital cameras dating from 1995. I still have it, and plan to do a separate tier of photographs using it for "The Parkways Projects" on Patreon.

It's up on Bluesky now @parkwaysprojects — by all means check it out! The core of the series is about the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Skyline Drive Parkways, Great Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah National Parks. There's many different layers to it, from the beginnings of all four NPS parks, its people, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the young men who built many of the classic timber-frame construction buildings. There will be many other related subjects, histories, stories and original archival photographs from the Open Parks Network, a collaboration between the National Park Service and Clemson University Library's Archives.

May 2, 2025 at 3:02 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

Atalaya #TomOgburn #DigitalCollage #Hybrids
#photography #collage #HumansOfBluesky #EastCoastKin #ArtYear
⬇️4ALT

"Atalaya," digital composite image, 2009, built from my photos in Photoshop. I'm a painter still, although a studio would enable that addiction quite well. I use Photoshop as a fluid media; as a painter employs paint.

The colors are rather dystopian, for they speak of 2009, further postmodern entry into not so brave a new world. Yet now we're very much in synch with both Huxley's & Orwell’s societal premonitions. A sense of acid-gold etches the azure sky, the snow white Atlantic's grand strand, snow white sand dunes with fragile sea oats afloat these earthen waves, all caught in a moment. I tried to make the sand & oats seem to be vibrating erratically. A subtle thing.

A portrait of a woman with the sand dunes & sea oats of Atalaya "castle" behind. Whether she still has a sense of belonging there, I guess I’ll learn as Time unfolds.

Atalaya is one of South Carolina's coastal State Parks. It has a deep, abiding significance to me as a SC native, for many reasons woven into the years I lived there. It would likely have been a place of solace perhaps, even for a time. Plans were to be here for two years while creating the baseline of a sequential series of artworks, "The Parkways Projects."

I came back from the Four Corners region to reaquaint with my home state, hoping that we were about to see a steady, if perhaps slow & bumpy return to democracy—guided by kindness, pragmatic realism & wisdom.

May 2, 2025 at 2:52 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

Haunted Hostess #TomOgburn #DigitalCollage #Hybrids
#photography #collage #HumansOfBluesky #EastCoastKin #ArtYear
⬇️4ALT

$A very abstracted analog and digital collage in rich blue tones. A young woman is seated on a high stool, her legs crossed while she inhales, smoking a cigarette in a 1930's era long cigarette holder. There is a red glow from the coal of her cigarette, the only other color other than blue. 10:45pm in the waning indigo blue skies of South Carolina. Far away a Canadian ghost from a small forest outpost of Alberta, where Royal Canadian Mounties still roam wild, dreaming of their glory days of defeating Luis Riel and Gabriel DuMont on the plains of Batoche. I mention this just to remind us that there have been other losses on the North American continent which also deprived the World of hope, and of a culture unique and wonderful. More wonderful than we, in this present. All pardons to Prime Minister Carney, as I'll wager he too once read of the Métis. A thousand ghosts on a thousand battlefields. And America is again left in the hands of wasting wraiths of shallow persons bereft of honor to once again try to shake the foundation of the United States to a fractured ruin. May they all be hoisted upon their own petards of ignorance :) That being said: This image was crafted for a friend long ago, sent aloft across miles of measureless ether waves in order to allow her a new persona online. I hope your podcast exceeded your wildest dreams, and that your ideas and mind allowed the humor and insights of the great northern plains to glow. Hopefully not from the radiation of your ghost spirit though ;)$

May 2, 2025 at 2:38 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

Do Dryads Dream of Unsilvered Lyres? #TomOgburn #photography #DigitalCollage #Hybrids #collage #HumansOfBluesky #EastCoastKin #ArtYear
⬇️4ALT

A model's reflection was noticed by me while she stood across the room by a 1920's desk fan and phone from the same era. My walls were painted a dark vermilion red, and an old oak secretary is placed against the wall.

"Do Dryads Dream of Unsilvered Lyres?

Powerful beyond measure
of olden ways passed through
portal after portal, in Time
they fell, but were they bound
into the grain of their own oak?

If so rendered in the felling
and encased by the revealing
of lovely grain cherished
by those who severed her abode
and so entrapped her—

She rises, not once in Time
after three days in state
but of her own volition
and through the spalls
of an unsilvered lyre.

Such are those of olden ways
found in these times.
For Time is her kingdom—
not ours, encumbered within
our feeble abstractions.

Lest we forget."

The original name of this work was something I don't remember at present. The name which stuck was "Unsilvered lyre," due to the mirror having lost its silvering in about thirty percent of its back surface, which makes for a strong sense of antiquity when you look at yourself in it. And that is where my poem sprang from when the model, wearing a dress over 110 years old on that day, a day which is now already a decade or so back in Time, for Dryads were notoriously fond of their own very special oaken tree homes. So fond, I believe, that they haunt every splinter of their former home. Including this oak secretary which belonged to my grandmother.

May 2, 2025 at 2:17 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

Agfa Opa #TomOgburn #DigitalCollage #Hybrids
#photography #collage #HumansOfBluesky #EastCoastKin #ArtYear
⬇️4ALT

One of a series of portraits for a series I called "Virtual Palladium." Both for the old photographic palladium prints, but also hearkening back to classical antiquity. This series was simply just a beautiful state of being I was in at the time, when I started thinking about recording all the creatives I know, and try to portray them in the array, the field of the disciplines they are in. Creatives, I tend to think, cross all practices, all disciplines.

The subject is looking through the viewfinder of his German grandfather's Agfa camera, hence the title of this work. The small photograph just underneath the camera is one he made with this camera on a trip to Germany to visit his grandparents, tulips in a field. It's overlayed again at bottom left and right.

May 2, 2025 at 1:33 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

"Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" ≈ Paul Gauguin

Estrella Contra #TomOgburn #DigitalCollage #Hybrids
#collage #HumansOfBluesky #EastCoastKin #ArtYear
⬇️4ALT

"Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" ≈ Paul Gauguin

Two figures, both women, in an abstract composition, emanating a sense of power, and of shielding others. Celadon greens to yellows, composed within a grid, or a star chamber in a universe allowing birth to new stars? At he bottom of this work, I've used Paul Gauguin's painting. The title is used as a quote above.

“Estrella Contra,” from the 'Human Grid' series. I think of these works as Petri dishes in which I observe cultures & in this case conceive of graphic novels.

This is an idea, based upon a friendship which has been with me since 1998, when I first began to consider where we as humans were, and where we may be going, within technology and the emerging power of the internet. Of course now, this is only a reflection of a time. By 2002, I was photographing models for a series I intended to put forward. It would be a multi-pantheon of gods juxtaposed upon a fabric of humans who had become part of a cyborgian ethic, a network.

The gods were to be drawings and paintings. The humans were to be digital builds, what I came to call digital composite images. There would be war, of course, for that is the earmark of human culture. Even those which exist only within an imagined Petri dish. This war would first manifest on gallery or institutional walls, but then I became a teacher. The idea was submerged underneath the teaching.

But it did not drown.

Over the years, it has floated up and down into my work, always a dichotomy of sorts still and I began sidebar works; the Human Grid, the Mythics, Human mandalas, for what if in becoming part of a machine ethic, we were to become enlightened? It could be an outcome, if one were writing a novel. For only when we as writers create our characters do we truly know who they are, or were—and why they make the choices they make.

In the wake of our creations, who is to say whether a wake is our past, or, our future?

May 2, 2025 at 1:11 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

🌙“The public and private worlds are inseparably connected... the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.” ≈ Virginia Woolf, 'Three Guineas'

Goodnight #Bluesky🦋 I need to watch something again🦉
#VirginiaWoolf #ThreeGuineas #Mindfulness #Observation
Video⬇️🧵

April 3, 2025 at 1:55 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

4th #VirtualPalladium works drop (each VP has more info in ALT text)

Alt self portrait #TomOgburn #digitalcollage (series 2007-14) These are fellow creatives from all disciplines. Two series began here.

#EastCoastKin 🦋 #ArtYear #landscape #photography #skyart #blueskyart #digitalart #digital 4️⃣ALT⬇️

March 31, 2025 at 9:26 PM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

Eunice (the darkness of cornflowers) #TomOgburn #Stunday #Skyart #BlueskyArt #Postmodern #Hybrids
#painting #collage #acrylic #artbrut #SouthernGothic
#EastCoastKin 🦋 #ArtYear

The Hybrids: A series begun in 2017 using any media & mode at my disposal. I weave & weld between analog to digital ⬇️4alt 🧵

This is a busy image, a black and white image glazed in ocher yellow, around her various sizes of cornflowers, torn from paper printed with images from magazines. Beside the young woman a skeleton dances gleefully, or ceremoniously. Colors are tans, beige, grays all glazed onto the wood panel. The torn paper images collaged in place all have raw white edges, but a soft golden brown glaze has been applied. It's a somber painting at this stage.

There was once a person in our extended family who was almost universally loved. She was young when she died, 28 years. Her memory has remained frozen within the amber emotion and memory. Today she is hardly remembered. I've spoken to many of the elders of Kershaw, South Carolina about her. But most have long left the coil, as used to be said. I'm going to try to reach one tomorrow by phone. I know he knew her firsthand, for he was a close childhood friend of my father. Dad was surprised the day I told him Eunice and he were kin. Very surprised, remaining dazed a bit at the news. "How close?," he asked. Second cousins, once removed, I offered. He furrowed his brow. He found something to do at that moment, and we never got back to the conversation on that visit.

"She was one of the dark ones, Tommy, but we loved her so much." My grandmother was Eunice's oldest sister. Half-sister as we recognized such distinctions for it mattered in some way, the father's derivation. By dark ones, Grandma meant disposition. Eunice was said to be at times jubilant. At times despondent. "Moody" seemed to be the word most used for years by her contemporaries to describe her personality. But Grandma would say Eunice was "just different. She saw things, you know, noticed things that happened. She cared a lot about people. At times way too much."

March 30, 2025 at 3:12 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

March 25, 2025 at 3:02 PM

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