Redwood Forests, August 2019
Information on edition size, pricing and framing options for Redwood Forests, California 2019 can be found here.
By returning to a geographical place a visitor has the opportunity to experience a landscape in a new way from what their memory might recall. While often a return visit to a place reaffirms those aspects that we remember broadly; the details and subtleties that are experienced by the senses set about exposing us to what we may have forgotten, as well as that which we may have missed entirely on earlier visits.
For Lincoln Schatz each return to the forests of Northern California has revealed a new facet of this landscape to explore through his artistic practice. Focusing on the Redwood Forests that cling to the edge of the Pacific Ocean in the Lost Coast region, this new series of photographs from Schatz chooses the often overlooked beauty that fills our national and state parks.
Take for example the selection of photographs at the top of the page, each individual photograph centers the stump of a tree, long cleared from the surrounding forest. While the old growth trees these stumps came from are now long gone, life has not ceased to exist. Out of the tops of each of these stumps, left with their deep roots intact and connecting them far into the earth and one another, one can see tumultuous, tumbling, flourishing foliage erupt. Branches, foliage and vines emanate from the scars of these once grand trees, growing for at least a hundred years before being felled by humans. Each becoming a site for new life.
Moving further into the Redwood Forests, we are rewarded finally with the interior forest, a place filled with fog draped trees, lichen, moss and a flourishing undergrowth. A stillness is ever-present in these spaces, the sounds of life much quieter, the air calm. These photographs allow us the time and space to contemplate, their subtlety and depth encouraging an immersion into their world.
From the dense undergrowth of the forest floor, Schatz finished his time on the beaches and along the cliffs that line the Pacific ocean in this area of Northern California. Boulders covered with bivalves, kelp and algae crowding the edges of the photographs, to reveal a lush and vibrant world teeming with life, color, texture and form.
Information on editioned prints and pricing can be found here.