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ENMU Graduate Selected by National Park Service as Artist in Residence
Nathan McCreery (BS78) of Clovis was recently selected by the National Park Service to serve as Artist in Residence for the 2010 artist season at Buffalo National River in Arkansas. Buffalo National River is the first river in the United States to receive the designation as a National River. It was made a National River in 1971.
The Artist in Residence Program in the National Parks recognizes the strong tie that exists between artists and national parks and the key influence the arts have had in the creation of several national parks. It allows selected artists the opportunity of working at their art within the boundaries of the selected national park for a designated period of time and encourages the creation of works of art that feature the park for use in the park’s art collection and to spread the word of the importance of our wild spaces and national parks. Typically the artist will donate a piece of art created during the period of residency, or inspired by it, and will give at least one public program about their art process to members of local communities or visitors to the park.
Each year participating parks receive requests for residency numbering into the hundreds, and those parks typically host only three or four Artists in Residence per season.
Nathan’s focus, for his period of residency, at Buffalo National River was the beauty of the areas around the Buffalo River. While most of his work is traditional black and white photography one of his main interests in this area was the spring bloom of dogwood and redbud trees. Both are native to this part of the country and while both species typically bloom in the spring, it is relatively rare for them to bloom at the same time. A very unseasonable blizzard the weekend before McCreery’s arrival delayed the bloom of the redbud trees and caused both trees to bloom together; a relatively uncommon occurrence.
Nathan is one of an increasingly small number of photographic artists who practices the photographic art in the traditional manner. Using very heavy, and cumbersome, view cameras, he trudges the American outback looking for the decisive moment in time when all of a dozen elements fall into place for the creation of an eloquent photograph. All of Nathan’s black and white film is processed by hand using chemical steps designed to get the most from each piece of film. The negatives are then printed by hand onto regular, traditional photographic paper in a traditional darkroom. “I try to avoid digital production as much as possible. It would be much simpler to pass print production off to someone else, and with digital it’s much easier to do that and control it than ever. However I believe that an artist’s DNA should be on every piece of work that leaves his studio. That’s the artist’s responsibility.
I want my patrons to know that the photographic image they display was made by me personally. That I exposed it, processed it and performed each step in the process for them. Up until very recently, I printed all my color and black and white work personally using a number of processes that I developed to translate what I saw in the field onto a piece of photographic paper. Unfortunately, it has become much more difficult to do that with my color work. The increasing proliferation of digital imaging has made the materials needed for hand printing color more difficult to obtain. For that reason the very major portion of my work is now in black and white since those materials are still readily available.”
Nathan has been selected to serve as Artist in Residence four times. At Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, Acadia National Park in Maine, at Pictured Rocks National Seashore in Michigan and at Buffalo National River in Arkansas. He was unable to serve the residency at Pictured Rocks due to a conflict in scheduling. He resides in Clovis, New Mexico, with his bride of 38 years, Virginia, a golden retriever and a border collie. His work may be viewed on line at nimbusart.com, discoveredartists. com and on his Facebook page.
