A veteran photographer with roots on a rural Waseca County farm and a degree from the University of Minnesota-Waseca and a Prior Lake artist with a photography degree and deep experience in painting are the latest two artists to be featured by the Waseca Art Center.
Dick Crumb and Abigail Blythe, whose work will be on display through Sept. 14 at the Art Center, shared with the gathered public last Thursday a bit about their background and artistic tastes at an open, free reception which included a chocolatier.
Crumb, the Waseca County native who graduated from High School in New Richland, said he picked up a love for photography as a college student at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, particularly drawn to the photography of Ansel Adams.
Born in 1902, Adams had his first photos published in 1921, and he soon became famous for striking black and white landscape photography of natural scenes of the American West, which were made particularly vivid by its sharp focus, vivid details and striking tonal contrasts.
“I was just struck by the beauty of his work,” Crumb said of Adams. “Even though it was black and white, I just loved the striking images that he would have.”
A staunch conservationist throughout his life, Adams photographed nearly all of the National Parks of his time and helped to expand the National Park system. For his work he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
As a college student, Crumb said that he was particularly drawn to Adams’s striking depiction of natural scenes and aspired to apply some of those unique techniques to capture the idyllic, peaceful beauty of Minnesota farm country where he grew up.
Now that he’s retired, Crumb has been able to more fully devote himself to his photographic hobby. Getting the perfect shot can often be a challenge for him, as he lost use of his legs in a car accident some 50 years ago, but it’s a challenge he’s come to crave.
“With my lack of mobility, I sometimes have to find creative ways to capture a shot,” Crumb said. “Sometimes I’ll drive by a place and go, ‘oh, I’ve got to get that,’ so it gives me a different perspective on how I use the spectacular scenery that’s around me and how I can capture that.”
In his retirement, Crumb has picked up a taste for color photography, in addition to the vivid black and white shots he loved in his youth. He said that he loves shots with rich colors which “jump off the page” and can’t help but capture the viewer’s attention.
Blythe graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art in Design with a Degree in Photography in 2005, and used those skills to capture life while teaching and living in Korea in subsequent years. In 2013, she moved back to Minnesota and soon began to pick up a taste for painting.
Using a limited color palette and a significant although often varying degree of abstraction, Blythe has sought to capture the spirit of her subjects in her work, which typically features a key subject such as animals, insects or people.
In addition to her specialty of oil painting, Blythe has dabbled in watercolors as well as drawing. She says that painting, a hobby picked up when she no longer had a dark room suitable to various photography techniques, helps her to feel calm and solitude.
As she has honed her painting skills, Blythe said that she’s learned that less is more when it comes to oil painting in particular. With just a handful of colors to work with, she said that the colors in fact tend to be more vibrant and pop from the page.
“Three colors versus 10 actually makes the colors more vibrant,” Blythe said. “The elephant that’s in there is duller than almost any other painting I had in there, because I was doing that before I did the limited palette, so it actually did the opposite of what you’d think it would do.”
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