LEAVES BY KACPER KOWALSKI & ANDY GOLDSWORTHY
Tender chartreuse springtime sprouts, growing to frank full-on summer greens, bidding bright farewells in fall, wither to ghostly brown remains. The ephemeral beauty of leaves begs to be captured and savored long after they have crunched and become part of the very ground from which they grow.
Check out the works of photographer Kacper Kowalski and artist Andy Goldsworthy who have celebrated the natural cycles of leaves, each with a distinctive fresh drama and riveting style.
Kowalski, a former architect, took up paragliding and began his journey with aerial photography. His original aerial photos of dense forests, in his series entitled “Old Patterns/Polish Patterns,” were created without the use of drones.
Goldsworthy’s newer works, as featured in the new documentary film Leaning into the Wind, directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer, show some of his more urban explorations: He climbs into a tree by a busy road. He miraculously walks inside huge leafless hedges. But here, we revisit his epic images of leaf circles and consider how they inform his art today.
Kacper Kowalski is a perfect storm: a pilot, and architect, and a photographer, all rolled up into one. He uses all of his credentials and talents to create the most amazing aerial photography.
Today, we are featuring Kowalski’s aerial fall foliage images. Like many of Kowalski’s works the patterns, symmetries and graphic compositions are what set them apart.
Kowalski controls both the planes and the cameras he uses, so he can really hone his compositions, speed and lighting, getting them to execute perfectly on his spectacular vision.
In these photos, Kowalski surveys two lakes and their surroundings in northern Poland, observing them from up on high in the sky as the seasons change. These autumn scenes are particularly compelling to us right now as we are more attuned to the beauty of the colored leaves on the trees that ring the lakes and stretch out across the land.
Kowalski has won numerous prestigious awards, including the World Press Photo Award, National Geographic Photography Award, Pilsner Urquell International Photography Award (IPA), Sony World Photography Award, Picture of the Year International (POYi), and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award.
If you’d like to purchase one of his prints, you can do so at the Leica Gallery Warsaw and 6x7art. Check out Kacper Kowaslki’s website for more about him and his work.
Britain’s best-known land artist, sculptor, photographer, and passionate environmentalist, Andy Goldsworthy, OBE, works with nature as his medium, to create site-specific works that tap into the permanence of impermanence and the cycles within that conundrum.
Originally inspired by renowned land artist Robert Smithson, over the course of more than 40 years, Goldsworthy’s art has evolved through a series of theme explorations. He is now creating monumental permanent works as private commissions. But now, we revisit his leaf-centric installations in which he explores the ephemeral nature of leaves as both reality and metaphor, and we see how it has developed in his recent works as we see in Thomas Riedelsheimer’s new film, Leaning into the Wind.
Goldsworthy collected leaves, flowers, and other organics materials and arranged them around a circular core, in round frames. The center circles of his works evoke eyes, holes in time, black holes, portals, windows in space and other disc-shaped realities, while the leaves, ironic in their ephemeral nature, anchor us.
“The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within,” say Goldsworthy. The works are temporary. The leaves are real. Nothing is glued down or preserved other than through the art of photography.
Goldsworthy photographs his own pieces, both to document their brief existence and because it is the only way to share their beauty since few people have ever seen the live installations.
"I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue."
Goldsworthy is the current A.D. White Professor-At-Large at Cornell University, while he resides mainly in Scotland. His installations have graced spots all over the world, including an awesome piece at the North Pole.
Learn more about Goldsworthy in the first documentary about his work, Rivers and Tides, directed by German filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer.
Goldsworthy is represented by Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris.
Read more about Beautiful Leaves all this week on BeautifulNow. See the World’s Most Beautiful Leaves, Soulful Dogs + Autumn Leaves, Leaves Change Us, You Can Take the Most Beautiful Autumn Photos!, Super Beauty in These Legal Leaves, and The Art of Tea. And check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Wellness, Impact, Nature/Science, Food, Arts/Design, and Travel, Daily Fix posts.
Want more stories like this? Sign up for our weekly BN Newsletter, Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. Join our BeautifulNow Community and connect with the most beautiful things happening in the world right now!
Do you have amazing photos? Enter them in this week’s BN Photo Competition.
