Artists Capture The Ohm In Nature

They’re pictures of the surfaces of water, of the roots systems of trees, but the scale the photographer chooses helps us look at them in a different way. Roy Money doesn’t pick landscapes that encourage us to take in the full view. They’re pictures of nature on a human scale, what you might see if you crouched down on a trail on the woods, or stopped to sit by a pond’s edge. But the sharp clarity of the images helps you see more detail than you might otherwise. It makes the roots of the tree look a little like a mountain range, or wrinkled fingers. It makes you look again.

Roy Money’s show Lost in the Woods and Kate Henderson’s show Dowsing for Water are paired for the latest exhibit at Kehler LIddell Gallery on Whalley Avenue, running through Nov. 17. From the start, it’s easy to see why. Both are taken with the shapes that nature creates, whether it’s patterns of leaves, tree branches, moving water, or freezing ice. They’re meditative as many of the best nature artists are. Without being preachy, together they offer a sense of a direction to go in once the meditation is over.

In the accompanying notes, Money explains that he took his photographs during a residents at Weir Farm, the home and studio of impressionist painter J. Alden Weir in Wilton now run by the National Park Service. It was an ​“experience of dropping the role of observer and giving myself up to perceptions of form, texture, color and the elemental creativity of their interactions in places where I wandered. It was not unlike listening to compelling music when the separation vanishes between you and what is heard…. In this manner photography is a way to savor the thrill of wonder.”

Money’s description of how he went about his work helps us understand how to approach his images. It’s telling that in entering the more mindful state that he describes, his eye wasn’t drawn to unusual features in the woods around him; instead, he became more attuned to the details of the things that make up most stretches of woods. The wonder he sought was to be found almost everywhere he looked, once he was in the right frame of mind to see it. That he sought to preserve it in an image is a message in itself. The stands of woods around us, whether they’re in Wilton or in our city parks, are something worth contemplating, and in the end, worth saving.

Henderson and Money share a meditative state of mind, but where Money sharpens the details of the natural world in his photographs, Henderson transforms them and imbues them with a sense of movement and energy. Her swirling colors work like time-lapse photography, reminding us that the scenery she paints are part of changing, dynamic systems — just as real holes in the ice suggest that the body of water in question is either on its way to freezing solid or melting. In The Last Giants, which accompanies Holes in the Ice, Henderson shows her hand a little. The enormous glaciers in that painting are giving way, slowly but unstoppably, to open ocean.

But it’s not a message of quiet doom. ​“I describe my artwork as depicting a sense of place and the energy in the world around us,” Henderson writes. ​“Using a combination of gestural and contour line, I translate elements of the natural world into a place of imagined passages. I think of art as a personal shamanic practice where meditation and ritual are as important to me as the final work. Creativity lives in us all, and it is in this creative spirit that connects us to a universal life force.” Getting meditative, noticing the details in nature, helps us connect with it, with each other, and with ourselves. Applied to the problems of how we continue to live on our changing planet, there’s the suggestion that if we reach a place of quiet clarity, we just might be able to find our way through.

Lost in the Woods and Dowsing for Water run at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through Nov. 17. Check the gallery’s website for details and hours.