Picture an amaryllis. Large burning red bloom atop a long elegant and juicily green stem, motionlessly erect in a room, rooted in rich dark soil. Every portion of this being is alive. Its cells are ceaseless action, nutrients course through its veins, it turns toward light. It stands and holds its mighty head open, outward, its grand petals sing their hue.

Or a doll: plastic, porcelain, marred by storm and neglect. Glass eyes, missing limbs, perhaps a “wrong” eye, a misfit limb. Sand ground into the pliable surfaces. Skull injured, creased from the pressure of a falling tree, a tricycle tire. Scuffed, miseried, maltreated, dead. A lifeless object that yet breathes and breeds vital responses from us, narratives, emotions.

Wooden birds. Empty frames. Taxidermied wildlife: a calf at rest, a bobcat in play, a fox in “motion.” Still and silent objects all. Vibrant and full, almost trembling with some strange energy someone sees.

Fire.

A photograph. A hundred photographs. A thousand. Who hasn’t stared into fire (campfire, forest fire, a candle, the hearth)? One man’s eyes are trained to the meditation of fire…

…the burn of a crop after harvest. Brushfire, stubble fire, blaze.

Flame dances. Exudes enormous heat. Billows smoke the size of clouds. Pops, cracks, punctuates giant skies with sound and light. Huffs like tornado’d wind, trains rushing through the night, calamitous waves, the “roaring fire.”

For the rancher smelling of sweat, soil and manure, of green grain, this grand blaze is a “controlled burn.” Framed. Captured. And yet emergency crews are at the ready. Power is unpredictable.

Larry Schwarm bought a camera to photograph his baby. It stuck.

Schwarm is from the vast flatness of Kansas. From horizon. From an ocean of soil. Unable to recall being unable to operate a tractor, at a certain bend in a certain field infinity appeared between two poles. Furrows followed forever-lines. Color was subtle, like twenty-seven shades of grey.

Buildings took shape in his mind, angles, shapes, structure. He sculpted. He kept taking pictures. People. Decisive moments presenting a face or body referencing the possible layers within, behind it. Composure. He found mirrors in the work of the abstract expressionist color field painters like Milton Avery, Mark Rothko.

Dirt. Land. Sky. Bush. Tree.

The simple sentences laid out word by word across a plane. Statement. Landscape. Black. White.

Year after year (some 40 years now!) the clicking of the shutter, the hands in the soil. Amaryllis’ rise, a 4×5 emerges correct: the combination of perfect composition and “it looking like it felt.” Thousands of contact sheets greasemarked and developed over the course of a year resulting in five. Or four. Or none at all to match his value.

Color crept into the language of sight and began the weave, the music, the inflections…fire.

It burns, it clouds, it cools…

It strafes, it wrecks, it grows…

It blooms…

Amaryllis and blaze, in Larry’s hands…complex paragraphs of vision…Rothko in an empty frame on the wall.

For more information about the artist, please see his website, at www.larryschwarm.com.

Nathan Filbert – 2/23/2010