From Nature to Scanner

Ingeborg Snipes’ digital photographs capture the patterns and colors of flowers, berries and leaves.

By: Amy Brummer

"Witch Hazel on Black," above, and "Reach," below, by Ingeborg Snipes. Both images were produced using flatbed scans.

   The fields at Snipes Farm and Nursery in Morrisville, Pa., are brown and damp from the spring thaw. But inside Ingeborg Snipes’ home, flowers and shrubs are already in leaf and bloom, albeit in the photographs that adorn her living-room walls.
   Ms. Snipes, who has lived on the farm for more than 50 years with her husband, Brad, will be showing her recent photographs at Pennswood Village Art Gallery in Newtown, Pa., through April 6. An avid photographer, Ms. Snipes picked up a camera after retiring from her job as garden center manager on the farm, a business owned by her husband’s family for several generations.
   After years of self-directed study, numerous workshops and courses at Bucks County Community College, Ms. Snipes has reached a new phase in her artistic journey. Her previous work, exhibited at the Philadelphia Sketch Club, Washington Crossing Visitors Center, the Ellarslie Museum in Trenton, and the Phillips’ Mill Photography Exhibition in Solebury, Pa., has reflected her interest in nature and color. Her recent work still adheres to these inspirations, but for her current photographs, she has given up her

camera, so to speak, opting instead for the 8½-by-11 "lens" of her flatbed scanner.
   Where she once traveled the globe to shoot slide film of sensuously sculpted canyons in Arizona or digital images of gargantuan, spiny edged lily pads in the Amazon, she now mines her domestic environs for subjects as commonplace as witch hazel or as exotic as heavenly bamboo.
   While the show will include some of Ms. Snipes’ previous film and digital images, the main focus is the work she has created in the past six months on the scanner. She came to the technique through a process of discovery that began with a quest find a specific, naturally occurring shape.
   "I had been trying for months to find a curve in nature that is a perfect quarter circle," Ms. Snipes says. "If you combine them in certain combinations, in certain sizes, they make a Fibonacci spiral, but it is very hard to find that perfect curve in nature because it has to be geometrically precise or the spiral doesn’t work."
   She realized that she could manipulate the curve directly on the scanner and began trying it out with some of her houseplants and other natural materials. Unfortunately, she just couldn’t get the results she was looking for and found the images "boring."
   "In the summer, I kept at it as different things came into bloom," she says. "The results got worse and worse, because I was treating the scanner as if it were a camera."

   In reality, the scanner is more like a canvas, and the process of putting together a picture was less about zeroing in on a specific aspect of a still life than it was about creating one. There is also the difficulty of working backward, creating layers from front to back, similar to reverse painting on glass. But her early efforts are not as disastrous as she claims.
   Pink dogwood flowers cut a diagonal swath against purple wisteria and green leaves in "April Flowers." In "Wedding Garden," a field of white finds shape in a scattering of white hydrangea and viburnum petals surrounding a single tulip, a tree peony and a stalk of bleeding heart.
   But when the autumn color set in, she found true inspiration.
   "All of a sudden you see this tremendous variation in this one shrub of crepe myrtle between the bright yellow, the mottled colors, then the red and the green into the really dark leaves," she says. "That is what really set me on fire in the fall, because I was seeing this variation in a number of plants on the grounds and I wanted to use that to create something artistically."
   Another influence was Rivers and Tides, a documentary about the British artist Andy Goldsworthy, which she had recently viewed. Mr. Goldsworthy creates monumental sculptures with natural materials such as rocks, sand and ice, looking to the long-term effects of weather and decay to transform the work, which is documented photographically.
   Similarly, Ms. Snipes chooses her subjects as they change in the garden, gleaning them when they have reached a certain point in their development, reorganizes them on the scanner bed, then makes her record. The images have no depth of field and become a collage of pattern and color that takes on a wholly different aesthetic when removed from their natural surroundings.
   Virginia creeper berries are no longer tucked into their foliage but strewn against a hot orange backdrop, their deep purples, bluish greens and ivory cavorting with Italian plums and a fat, crooked yellow squash in "Becoming." In another, witch hazel branches delineate an assortment of crooked spaces, their fiesta colored blooms contrasting against a variety of background colors. Removed from the stark January backdrop, these winter blossoms curl like bursts of confetti against a lush green lawn or starless black sky.
   She also created multiple images from her winter poinsettia, reworking the pink and green leaves into a grid pattern as an homage to the modernist painter Piet Mondrian or folding the prints into the shape of an accordion fan.
   "The show is structured around the theme of variations," she says, "the variations within a plant-like crepe myrtle, heavenly bamboo, flowering pear or poinsettia. There is also a variation in photo techniques as well — the darkroom prints, the digital prints, the prints on the scanner, as well as variations on artists who have influenced me like Goldsworthy and Mondrian."
   Another take on that theme is the poetry that will accompany the photographs in the show. It was an idea she had tossed around in the past with a poet she knew from Artsbridge, an artist’s cooperative with which Ms. Snipes is affiliated. Through the organization, which holds exhibits in its Lambertville gallery and publishes a literary journal each year, she met Catherine DeChico, a poet from Pennington, who wrote poems specifically for the images in the show.
   Brief, yet deeply etched, the poems respond to the moods, tones, textures and emotions Ms. Snipes’ work conjures and conveys.
   Ms. DeChico’s vivid language and Ms. Snipes’ colorful photographs are a welcome reminder that even in the chill of winter, there is still color and life in nature. Even in the dreariness of the season’s fading days, it is a herald of an impending spring.
Variations: Photographs by Ingeborg Snipes and Poetry by Catherine DeChico is on view at the Pennswood Art Gallery, 1328 Newtown-Langhorne Road, Newtown, Pa., through April 6. Opening reception: March 14, 2-4 p.m., with a gallery talk by Ms. Snipes at 3 p.m. Gallery hours: Daily 9 a.m.-8 p.m. For information, call (215) 968-9110. On the Web: www.ingeborgsnipes.com