ROBERT Hartman's art studio is the wild blue yonder. His canvas is California landscape that appears flat, barren and boring to the ordinary eye. That's before he transforms it into something creative and unique.
Hartman is an abstract painter turned aerial photographer. His application of infrared on his camera shots of uninhabited Central California has produced, perhaps, his finest abstract work.
His process is so different, so magical, that he has unintentionally merged his two worlds: His photographs resemble paintings.
"A lot of the time, when I'm taking the picture, I'm just looking at the big configurations," he said. "So when I get the film back from being processed, I'll see things I didn't know were there. Then when I print it, I'll see all kinds of things I hadn't seen when I took it."
And after the infrared film works its wonders, it's new all over again. Green vegetation becomes red or magenta.
"It gives me surprises, and I like surprises,"he said. "The color you can get is just unbelievable."
Hartman, 80, has been shooting from the skies since 1976, but didn't get into infrared film until 1998.
"I'm not a nature photographer," he said. "I'm a photographer of the evidence of human activity. The Central Valley is just inexhaustible with that. There's always strange things happening with the way things are done."
Sometimes, his art subject is just sitting there, unchanged. Other times, a form of excavation or the building process can change the landscape dramatically, achieving remarkable results for this accomplished shutterbug.
Hartman's work is shown regularly at Triangle Gallery in San Francisco. And his photography as well as earlier abstract paintings and drawings have been exhibited all across the country and in Europe and Japan.
Three elements — suspension, a sense of disorientation, and solitude — make flying fascinating to him. These same elements apply to his photography.
He taught art at the University of California, Berkeley, for 30 years, two years as department chairman, before retiring in 1991. He has lived in the Oakland hills with his wife of 55 years, Charlotte, since 1963.
He flew his own single-engine plane, piloting and taking photographs simultaneously, until double-bypass surgery in 1998 forced him to hire a pilot in order to continue with his semimonthly explorations.
At the controls or otherwise, he can't dally when he spots an idea anywhere from 1,000 feet to 8,000 feet in altitude.
"It takes instant recognition," he said. "It's not like you have a camera on a tripod. You've just got split seconds up there."
Imagine what it was like when he was his own pilot. The plane would be banked at a steep angle — his knee directing the stick, his foot against the rudder — as he photographed downward through the open glass of the cockpit. He was Crash Corrigan with a camera, although he hasn't ever crashed. He did have one narrow escape, though, in the early 1990s.
"I took off on a runway at Concord," he said. "By the time I got to Martinez. ... All hell broke loose. Tremendous screeching, horrible shaking. I had to throttle back all the way. The engine idled, but wouldn't quit. It was really good fortune. It could have been not as happy an ending as it was."
He has his share of awards and fellowships. But he's so modest about it all that he's the last featured artist you'd pick out at one of his exhibits if you didn't know him already. He doesn't believe in standing out in a crowd. The background is just fine with him.
However, one show of recognition touched him deeply. Four of his UC Berkeley students surprised him at a 2005 art symposium on campus by extolling his impact on their careers. He was left "incoherent."
California artist Maynard Dixon was his inspiration as a youth. He admired Dixon's use of light. Hartman's photography depends on natural light.
"I hope to keep improving," he said. "An artist's art develops through a continuing sense of dissatisfaction. The feelings of accomplishment are very short-lived.
"But there's something new out there all the time. The visual riches are just astonishing."
Then he enriches them.
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