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June 13, 2026 — July 4, 2026
Craggy Gardens Ancient Tree — Lynne Buchanan
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Lynne Buchanan is a lens-based artist based in Western North Carolina. Her work explores her intimate connection to the natural world and how her perceptions of biodiversity in the environment influence her philosophy of life. Buchanan’s images examine identity in difference, interconnection, the history of place, metaphor, and the nature of being.
Robert Treat is a California artist whose paintings and photographs are generally organic oriented. His work exhibits a strong structural awareness often verging into unconscious abstraction. Primary concerns involve nature, structure, spiritualism, loss, and memory. Much of the time both painting and photography merge together. Working frequently with primitive materials such as beeswax and textured paper, Robert's paintings/photographs result in sensuous tactile surfaces and strong active shapes. For him it is a way of rediscovering a sense of self, a quality that tends to get repressed by today's modernity and media-representation.
Buchanan began her photographic life as an environmental photographer. The ecological issues she witnessed impacted her psychologically and she began creating work that was more emotional, often working in black and white. Buchanan is the recipient of a master’s degree in art history and museum studies from George Washington University. She is a self-taught photographer and multi-media artist. Mentors include Clyde Butcher and Jill Enfield, and she learned the Malde-Ware platinum-palladium print out method from Pradip Malde. Buchanan often prints in these rare metals to evoke the preciousness of life and to preserve transitory states of being in a lasting way. She feels introducing her own hand into the process deepens her connection with the subjects she photographs and connects her subjective experiences with objective reality.
Buchanan is the author of two books: Florida’s Changing Waters: A Beautiful World in Peril, and The Poetry of Being, for which she received Silver Medals in the Tokyo and Budapest International Photography awards. Buchanan’s books are in libraries and university collections across the country. She has spoken about her work at the Miami Book Fair, The Society for Environmental Journalism and the North American Nature Photography Summit. Buchanan was selected to attend Review Santa Fe twice and has been recognized as a top 200 artist by Critical Mass. Buchanan’s work has been reviewed in numerous print and on-line publications and she has contributed articles for Waterkeeper Magazine, even traveling to Bangladesh to work with waterkeepers there. Her award-winning photography has been exhibited nationally and internationally in both solo and group exhibitions and is in the collections of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, LA and The Bishop Museum of Science and Nature in Bradenton, FL.
Seeking Indra’s Net in Nature
Platinum-Palladium Prints of the Natural World in the United States and Japan by Lynne Buchanan
My hope is that my art inspires people to become better stewards of the Earth, our only home. I chose to print these images in platinum and palladium to underscore how invaluable the natural world is to our survival, while the luminosity of these precious metals helps convey the spiritual realm I believe is embedded in the natural world. This 19th century wet process also has exceptional longevity and is congruent with the sense of deep time expressed in my work, which extends beyond our limited temporal existence.
My work long focused on the natural world and the lessons nature has taught me. Being in nature and expressing my experiences artistically has allowed me to become more balanced and live in greater harmony with the world around me. Experiencing nature in a poetic way can be both healing and purifying, since we come to understand our place in the universe as one jewel in Indra’s net. Nature has shown me the importance of preserving biodiversity and the need to work together for our own health and for survival of the biosphere. I have experienced the energy of ancient trees and seen how they work together and with fungi to create richer manifestations of life, often helping each other survive adverse conditions and disease. As I age, I find myself exploring my emotional reaction to fragility and perseverance, and my work celebrates the preciousness of all life. I am especially drawn to the tenuous beauty of impermanence. Observing interactions between lifeforms and how nature maintains continuity through change helps me face the increasingly precarious nature of existence. I believe studying the natural world can show us new ways of working together that might form the basis of a more sustainable society.
When I traveled to Japan in 2025, my belief in the sacredness of the environment was reaffirmed by both the natural beauty of the country and the Japanese people’s appreciation of all nature, including rocks and trees. The Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida wrote, “God is that which dissolves the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity and unites spirit with nature.” When we come into direct union with nature, we feel our smaller selves unite with something larger and eternally cyclical that allows us to live in right relation to the ecosphere. This is beneficial for our mental health and the health of the planet, especially in these unsettled times. When I visited Zen Temples and Shinto Shrines, I was filled with awe and I sensed the vibrations of this unifying spirit: I felt that I had finally arrived home. I hope you experience the sense of peace I experienced.
Robert’s formal training is in Architecture and Fine Arts from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. After graduation, his interests expanded to photography and film animation. Along with his photographic and painting career, he has been involved in the Hollywood animation industry for over thirty years. Robert currently resides in San Diego.
Having worked in lens based photographic imagery for many years, I began to miss my background of hands-on painting and printmaking.
So with this body of work, I've combined these two realms, working primarily with painterly non-representational shapes while using cyanotype as my medium of choice. These minimal images stem from an immediacy involving the therapeutic activity of mark making. The cyanotype process permits me to draw and scrape with ink and other media on acetate to create a contact negative. This is then printed onto a variety of papers. It’s then mounted as Chine colle onto Rives BFK, at times using a blank embossing plate run through an intaglio press and other times encaustic is applied over the image to create a more physical appearance.
