Cover story: Charged with life -- Photographer Robert Buelteman abandoned his camera to expose the unfamiliar beauty of common flora Cover story: Charged with life -- Photographer Robert Buelteman abandoned his camera to expose the unfamiliar beauty of common flora (November 09, 2005)

By Andrea Gemmet

Almanac Staff Writer

Crackling with vibrant colors, a parrot tulip seems to tremble with barely suppressed energy, its leaves spread like wings about to take flight. Viewers have two choices -- to simply marvel at the alien beauty exposed in an ordinary tulip, or to try and figure out how the striking image was created.

Artist Robert Buelteman hates it when they try to figure out how he did it.

It's not that he's trying to keep a secret of the painstaking and innovative method he developed over three years of trial and error, using the idea behind Kirlian photography of running electrical current through living plants and capturing the resulting corona directly on film.

Or how he adapted the process by using fine points of light to illuminate his subject the way a painter wields a brush, layering carefully chosen details onto the exposed film.

It's just that it's not the point.

"When people ask me how I do it, they could care less about the current or the fiber optics. They want a point of access. They want to know, 'What's this all about?'" Mr. Buelteman says.

Interest in how he makes the images has been both a blessing and a curse, he says. Anyone who makes a living from art is happy to have people interested in his work. On the other hand, even top photographers have listened to his explanation of how he does it and remained perplexed, Mr. Buelteman says.

Adobe Systems representatives wanted him to give a lecture about how he uses their software to create his art, and were nonplussed to learn that he doesn't use computers to manipulate his images, he says.

It's a painstaking, occasionally hazardous, and entirely handmade process, done in total darkness, and Mr. Buelteman clearly would rather leave the process back in his darkroom.

"It's not going to get you any closer to the mystery of life, or how (the work) makes you feel," he says.

But he is gracious in his impatience, understanding that it is human nature be uncomfortable with unanswered questions. Learning to embrace uncertainty is not something that came easily to him, either.

Mr. Buelteman, whose black and white photography has hung alongside that of Ansel Adams, essentially abandoned a successful 25-year career as a nature photographer in 1999 in order to pursue what he refers to as his "Green Fuse" artwork. The term comes from Dylan Thomas' poem, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower."

Mr. Buelteman picked up a camera for the first time in 1973. He didn't come to it willingly. A friend who owed him money kept trying to get him to take an old Yoshika camera instead, he says. When he finally gave in, he took the camera on a trip to Utah. Looking through the lens and seeing the sun setting on the mountain peaks over a canyon, he says: "I had a full-on transcendent experience. It sounds silly, but it was one of the most profound moments I've ever had."

At that moment, his love of the landscape, his desire to create art and capture beauty, and his desire to make some sort of contribution to the world suddenly came together. So the Woodside native gave up his plans to become a pilot like his father, quit studying aeronautics at the University of Colorado, and pursued photography.

He couldn't get into a photography program, so he studied chemistry, getting an understanding of the trigonometry of optics and of optical design.

"To this day, it's a point of shame and some embarrassment that I know so little about art," he says, although that untraditional background probably freed him from photographic conventions.

He put out three well-received books of his work: "A Vision of Life" in 1988; "The Unseen Peninsula" in 1994; and "Eighteen Days in June" in 2000, based on his work at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside.

Abandoning that career was not an easy decision, but it was a necessary one, he says. He wanted to leave photographic traditions behind and learn something new, he says. What really frustrated him, he says, is that it's all been done.

"I don't want to walk a well-worn path. I want to walk a path worn by the walking," says Mr. Buelteman.

So he spent three years trying to figure out how to create the images he envisioned on film with no camera and no lens. After three years of relentless toil, a couple of near-death experiences and countless failed attempts, he had a collection of 25 completed prints.

He says that in a process where he looked bad for so long, he's come to a different understanding of himself, and is able to step back and be ruthlessly critical of his own work.

"You have to divorce yourself from the story. It's not about how you thought it up, or how many shots you took to get it," he says.

Black-and-white photography is like classical music, he says, paraphrasing Ansel Adams. The creation of the negative is like writing the musical score, and every time you put it into the enlarger is like a performance of that score, Mr. Buelteman says. His new work he likens to improvisational jazz, when the creation and the performance is simultaneous.

Black-and-white photography has 16 variables. The "Green Fuse" work has over 50, he says.

"This is like dancing. Black-and-white photography is like dictating. There are many, many partners -- the subject itself, the vision I have for the piece in my head, which is often not the way things turn out," Mr. Buelteman says. "This is a process where failure is your partner."

While he was trying to bring his idea to fruition, he suffered two near-electrocutions, had to take out a substantial loan, and risked alienating all of the clients and galleries that had supported his work. And he had no way of knowing if it would ever work out.

"It took me 3,000 sheets of 8 x 10 film to get 25 prints over a period of three years," he says.

Mr. Buelteman, who makes his home in Montara, has a comfortable perspective for looking back on his long struggle -- the "Green Fuse" work has been very well received. It's currently being shown as the inaugural exhibit in the new Spur Projects gallery in Portola Valley, and his original portfolio was recently acquired by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Sonja and Bill Davidow of Woodside were fans of Mr. Buelteman's photography, and decided to sponsor his initial efforts to make the "Green Fuse" series. It was the first time they had ever backed an artist, Ms. Davidow says.

She and her husband collect art "in a very small way," she says, and they were excited by Mr. Buelteman's new direction.

"I think we felt it represented an art form rather than just a form of photography, that it was something unique and definitely should be marketed as an art form," says Ms. Davidow.

Mr. Buelteman says his new images just don't work as photography, so he gave up relationships with photo galleries he'd cultivated over two decades and now shows his "Green Fuse" work only in art galleries.

"There's been a great response from the community," says Jessica Lonergan, who owns Spur Projects with her husband Frank. Although the gallery has been open for only a few weeks, a quarter of Mr. Buelteman's prints have already been sold, she says.

"It gives me great joy to see how well received (my art is)," he says. He regularly hears from people who have bought his artwork, he says, and getting an e-mail from someone who says, "I live with your work and I love it" -- well, "it just doesn't get any better than that."

While Mr. Buelteman's original portfolio was inspired, and for the most part supplied, by plants from his garden in Montara, his new work is the result of his time in New Mexico. He is the artist in residence at the Santa Fe Institute and spends one-third of the year there, hobnobbing with scientists and Nobel laureates, he says.

He hesitated to join -- "I would never join any club that would have me as a member," he says, echoing Groucho Marx -- but he's found it to be fertile ground, despite the fact that he's the only artist at the institute, a multidisciplinary scientific research community.

An admitted aficionado of quotations, he cites Arthur Koestler: "Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself."

"This creativity is no different than that creativity," Mr. Buelteman says.

His latest work focuses not only on the flora of the Southwest, but on nonliving objects as well. A picked flower loses its ability to carry the electric current, usually in a matter of hours, he says. The dried seeds of a dandelion, pieces of a wasp's nest or chunks of a beehive, all things he's been tinkering with in his darkroom, don't conduct electricity, he says. Of course, life can exist in unexpected places.

Mr. Buelteman looks ruefully down at the now-moldy beehive. "We were quite surprised when we found little baby bees emerging from it one day," he says.

His time in Santa Fe also brought him back to a former mentor, photographer Walter Chapelle, who died unexpectedly in 2000.

"I met a woman at a party and she asked me if I knew Walter," he recounts. "She walked me out back -- she lives on a ranch -- and there's his grave. I finally had a chance to thank him."

Death has been a momentous presence in recent years. In 1996, the year he had a residency at Djerassi, his mother, his wife's mother and his youngest sister all died. Recalling it still brings tears to his eyes.

"All great art has death at its roots," he says. "Seeing the end of a person's life, if that doesn't change you forever, you're not paying attention."

It became clear, he says, that everyone has only a certain number of days.

"When you get clear, when you know that here," he says, tapping on his chest, "that's the most transformational moment anyone ever has."

"I don't want to make art that's ordinary, I don't want to make art that merely sells," Mr. Buelteman says.

He sheepishly admits that he does think that he is making great art.

"This work is a joyful celebration of the world. All these plants are right there, right outside, and we never notice them," he says.

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