The Damsel of the Kaaterskill Creek Photograph by Terrance DePietro

The Damsel of the Kaaterskill Creek

by Terrance DePietro

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$4.95

Title

The Damsel of the Kaaterskill Creek

Artist

Terrance DePietro

Medium

Photograph - Photograph

Description

Not nearly one of the more impressive images of the Kaaterskill; for than matter, not one of the most impressive nature studies of my early years. And yet, it has character, composition; holds up to formal qualities and is far from being poor of subject. What really makes it necessary to this gallery are its 'implications'...And those only came to light some twenty years after it was captured, fixed in emulsion and magically rendered as image. And the year was 1964.

The implications might be said to start in the image's 'abstractness', especially that the study is of nature and nature is not abstract; even if it is the object of abstraction. And of its abstractness, the image goes further than the obvious of being rendered B&W, which is abstraction by its very nature. Here the abstractness is of the constituents of form, texture and its most important ingredient 'subjective relativity', for the image taunts the viewer's imagination...And in so doing: the image arrives animated, imaginal - if only in the mysterious of an 'individual' perception.

Yet sometimes the line is crossed; sometimes what is 'conjured' by one mind is repeated in the minds of other viewers. What implication is thus suggested? How can abstract form, of the amorphous genre, so easily attract correspondences from a diversity of minds? The plurality of predispositions would have to be perceiving something of a universal - 'form' in its 'potential', what it can be, or could be; if we are adverse to say: what it [also] is!

In the case here, many years ago a viewer reflected to me that a voluptuous woman, seemingly in distress, appeared to be going over a falls. And that would be in keeping with the subject of nature as depicted...But there again nature and the flowing current, cascading, frothing, is but ten inches in height - yet since his first announce, I saw her as distinctly as he, and all that were gathered too saw her and asked how I had convinced her to bear her breasts for the shoot.

And it did not end there, for a couple of years later another group passed the image around, finding a menagerie of persons, animals and cartoon figures in the image. I myself have, within the image, more than a dozen most distinct figures and more that morph upon occasion. I do not press more than I recognize specifically and I never attempt to play out the imaginal by extension into a fantasy...I am content in the 'true' of the form and have no need to falsify it into a fantasy [the impossible]. In its trueness it has been companion, for decades...

'Subjective', certainly; yet that subjectivity has nourished imagination and that has cultivated questions; and the questions have placed me in quest; and quest has motivated me to move beyond merely 'knowing-of'; thus, experiencing firsthand what: Nature Loves to Hide...Call it perhaps 'imaginal'.
5jan17 tdp

21sept18 - An additional note needs to be rendered, later perhaps expanded. That the damsel is without question apparent once located, the appearance becomes more interesting when it is assigned character in simile to the folklore of Melusina. My task, hereafter, is to study the implications of such an intuitive suggestion; or review the course I treaded in the 'then' and 'now' of my voyaging event. Most interesting is that Melusina archetypically corresponds to Intuition - and that is a subject of high importance in my concerns, both artistically and intellectually. -tdp

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