Paragraphs by Paul Miller
Sunday evening I settled down to watch Sunday Night Football (I am an intellectual). During the first commercial I spotted a Christmas gift from our friends Joel and Sahar still on the couch near its green and red wrappings. It was a coffee table book called Visions of Marin. I opened it, and as a result turned off the TV.
Visions of Marin is not an average photo book. It is beyond gorgeous; it is superbly written; it is inspiring.
Photographer Richard P. Blair and author Kathleen P. Goodwin of Inverness have unloaded all their skills and all their love into this book. Both are seasoned professionals in their disciplines, and it shows in what they have created in this important regional work.
Blair has the aesthetic sense and work ethic in finding a story-telling image in the perfect glow or flow of natural light no matter how difficult that is to do. This book manifests that he is dedicated in the same way the late National Geographic photographer Galen Rowell was. Having visited Rowell's Mountain Light Gallery in Bishop, California, I can see Blair's similar commitment to find the right scene in the right light no matter the effort.
No photos in this book are clichés; none are boring. Every image is composed and cropped to perfection. "Lake Nicasio Looking North", "Saddle in Tack Barn" at the Murphy Ranch in Point Reyes National Seashore, and "Rodeo Beach Surfer at Sunset" at the Marin Headlands, are visions that get stuck in a reader's imagination. The larger pictures' stories keep going in small photo inserts here and there. For example, embedded between two 5 x 7-inch photos of uphill tour bikers is a 1 x .75-inch image of a boy, also helmeted, and on his hot Tiburon scooter.
But my favorite photo is "Raven" on Wilson Hill Road. It is the definitive image of the species. It is the best photo of a raven ever taken. In this one print the bird's beauty, intelligence and attitude are arrested.
Accompanying all this visual information about Marin are Goodwin's concretely written captions and vividly delivered background accounts about the history of what the reader is seeing. For example, her detailed description of Novato's history is all a reader needs. Perhaps because Goodwin is also a professional painter, she has learned that the mark of a pro is self-discipline: the skill to know when the painting is right--has enough in it--and the will to stop at that moment.
Goodwin's writing about organic farming, about the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, about Wild Care in San Rafael and about The Marine Mammal Center at Fort Cronkite is edifying. Her account of how Point Reyes was saved and how the Giacomini wetland restoration project exemplifies local and national people working together for good--those kinds of inclusions make this book more than just one to entertain a reader. They inspire a reader to help preserve Marin's natural world so that this beautiful world is preserved for real and not just in Visions of Marin.
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Long time Marinite Paul Miller
was editorial cartoonist for the Marin IJ, sports cartoonist for the
Novato Advance, a cover cartoonist for the Pacific Sun, and is
currently a cartoonist illustrator for The Ark. He's had cartoons
published in the San Francisco Chronicle and his surf paintings have
been published on the Surfriders Foundation website. He joins MoreMarin
as a contributing editorial cartoonist.
Miller, a former Marine
and UCLA graduate, taught a cartooning course in the art department at
the College of Marin. His paintings and drawings are in private
collections in California, Arizona, Washington, Hawaii, Texas, Florida
and Provence, France. Miller's book, A Cartoonist's Guide to Prostate Cancer, was described by Dr. Dean Edell as "a must for any man facing prostate cancer!"
It takes an artist, naturalist, and romantic such as Paul Miller to recognize others of this same propensity -- Richard Blair & Kathleen Goodwin. "Visions of Marin" is interesting, informative, beautiful, and a book you can keep close at hand on the coffee table to enjoy over and over again.
Posted by: Joel Bartlett | Thursday, December 31, 2009 at 02:50 PM