The wave arcs upward, jade green and gleaming. British photographer Rachael Talibart has caught the water at the height of the movement, in the full thrust forward before the wave crests and creams over. And when she takes images like this one, she often comes out into the storm to catch them.
Cassandra Sohn tells me about her on a January morning in her gallery in Lenox. Talibart has been winning international attention with her images, Sohn says, and traveling the world with her long lenses. She is photographing in Antarctica this winter, as her work appears in the Guardian back home.
And this wave she saw off the South cost of England. Talibart has named the image Sedna, for an Inuit goddess and mother of the sea. Caught in this moment, the water has a stippled surface, rough and smooth at once, like the quartzite bluffs on the ridge above Pine Cobble.
And the water is as deep and clear a green as the old trees around the corner, covered to their twig ends with moss and ferns. Neil Burnell made this photo with patient care in Wistman’s Wood, a high oak forest in Dartmoor, in the early hours before dawn.
Sohn has family there, she said, who live on the moors, and she thought of the people there over generations, telling stories about the Green Man while people on the northern shores of Inuit Nunangat tell stories about a woman who swims like a whale and holds sea creatures in her long hair.
Rachael Talibart's 'Face-off' catches a wave towering against black rock on the coast of Oregon. Press photo courtesy of the Sohn Gallery
Artists on the loose
Art in the Berkshires ranges this winter from 17th century drawings at the Clark Art Institute to EJ Hill’s rollercoasters and Amy Yoes’ abstract textile art at Mass MoCA. Contemporary artwork honors Shirley Jackson’s speculative fiction at Bennington Museum, and Hilary Knight, the illustrator and co-creator of the internationally known Eloise books, comes to the Norman Rockwell Museum …
Evergreen trees reflect in ice-rimmed water on a winter day in an image at the Southern Vermont Arts Center. Press photo courtesy of SVAC
A horse sculpture made of scarlet vines canters at the foot of the hill at the Bennington Museum.
The outdoor sculpture Big Bling catches sunset light in golden curves in North Adams.
EJ Hill's Brake Run Helix brings a rideable roller coaster to Mass MoCA.
Eloise in the books by Kay Thompson — the indomitable six-year-old girl who lives in the Plaza Hotel — dances down the hall and out of a bath. Press image courtesy of the Norman Rockwell Museum
A Black man plays the cello softly as a woman leans on his shoulder at dusk, in a photograph in Lorenzo Baker's new work at MCLA. Press image courtesy of the artist
A green curtain catches sunlight behind the pink roller coaster track in EJ Hill's Brake Run Helix in Building 5 at Mass MoCA. Press image courtesy of Mass MoCA
Birch trees stand on a shadowed winter hill in Nate Massari's 'A Shadow over Raven Rocks,' invoking recollection and memory. Press photo courtesy of Bennington Museum
Events coming up …
Find more art and performance, outdoors and food in the BTW events calendar.
