Jeffrey Blondes (US, 1956)
41° North:Views of Nantucket 2023-2025
Real time 3840x2160 ProRes422LT 4K Full HD
41 hour looped film
Computer, custom wood frame, 55" screen horizontal
*These sequences are a selection of 6 second segments with no transitions, excerpted from the original work.
In a tangential homage to Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji, Blondes’ Nantucket film records the island across all seasons and weather. On first researching the project, he discovered that Nantucket boasts one of the greatest diversities of wild grasses in North America and, according to the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, its sandplain grasslands are among the last strongholds for this habitat type, with an estimated 85–98% of such areas lost worldwide since the 1850s.
Each sequence is 1 hour long, with the camera panning slowly up from the foreground vegetation over 30 minutes to reveal the horizon-line beyond and the varied multiplicity of bodies of water that surround and criss-cross the island from coast to coast,
Making 4 seasonal trips, from the autumn of 2023 to the summer of 2024, Blondes filmed dawn until dusk with a Sony 4K HD camera mounted on a customised, motorised rostrum. Back in France, he then spent weeks painstakingly editing the final film down from over 60 hours of rushes.
Jeffrey Blondes is an artist whose practice is rooted in his direct and personal experience of landscape. Even as his medium has evolved from oil paint to high-definition film, the shift in tools has not changed his core sensibility - an unwavering and immersive interaction with nature and the effects of light and time on the landscape.
From the mid-1980s, Blondes has exhibited widely in the US, UK, Canada, China and France. His painting method was traditional: working en plein air with portable panels and oils, immersed for hours in focused, trance-like observation. Blondes sought to capture not just the visual but also the emotional experience of a scenewhat Constable called “another word for feeling.”
In 2004, Blondes painted the same tree near his home once a week for a year. Alongside this, he filmed the tree for an hour each session, producing his first 52-hour video.This marked a Damascene turning point – a film, without the distraction of artistic technique, enabled the viewer to share directly in the artist‘s scrutiny and experience.
Since then, Blondes has produced over 50 films, ranging from 9 to 104 hours, shot across the globe, from the Arctic Circle in Sweden to Tierra del Fuego.While filming presents multiple challengeslogistical and technical complexity, not to mention the vagaries of weather - his goal remains unchanged: to observe keenly and share these observations on the intersection of time and landscape with his audience.
Born in Washington, D. C. in 1956, Blondes moved to France in 1981.The artist’s work is collected both publicly and privately. Past exhibitions include the Centre d’Arts et de Nature, Chaumont- sur-Loire; Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France;Three Shadows Gallery, Xiamen, China;The Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul,Turkey;The Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, CT and many other regional museums internationally. He has completed commission work for many private collections as well as The Borusan Collection, Istanbul,Turkey; and Stanford Arts, Stanford University, CA.To underscore the contemplative, meditative quality of his work, it is worth noting that his films are installed in five hospitals around the world.
Have you ever seen an inch worm crawl up a leaf or twig, and there clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach something?That’s like me. I’m trying to find something out there beyond the place in which I have footing.
— Albert Pinkham Ryder