Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 17

Fungi Art for Sale by Artist 17

The mycelium which is fruiting and producing the mushrooms at the time of a mushroom picture may be anything from a relatively new fungus growth to a much older, established fungus. A well established fungus mycelium may stretch over great areas underground or throughout the mass of a rotting stump or log. It is particularly dramatic to imagine the hidden mycelium of a fungus in a huge redwood stump or log where one sees them within the vestiges of the old growth redwood forests and within the remains of the forests left after decades of ruthless logging. In those ravaged areas, there is no shortage of massive redwood stumps and trunks large enough to nourish fungi for many generations to come. When you browse the pictures in this mushroom and fungi picture gallery, try to imagine the breadth of the fungus network which supports the mushrooms in the pictures. Think of it as a full fungi gallery, and not just a mushroom gallery.


Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 10

Especially for the wild mushroom fine art giclee prints taken of fungi living on the forest floor such as that of the great California coastal redwood forests. The mushroom photographs taken there almost always show aspects of the life cycle of the redwood forest as well as their own. In those pictures there seems to always creep in some of the characteristic organic litter of the redwood forest or the mushrooms themselves in the pictures are growing from a log or fallen redwood branch. …

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 15

If you chose to do so, you certainly could set out to make a fungi art gallery out of the actual fungus mycelia which produce the mushroom fruit bodies, but then you would miss out on all the great mushrooms the mycelia produce. Taking pictures to create that kind of a fungi gallery would be more like taking pictures to create a rose gallery of rose stems, roots, and petals, instead of a gallery of rose blossoms. …

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 11

The forest provides absolutely everything required by the fungi mycelium. The decaying organic debris of the forest gives the mycelium all the nutrients it will need throughout its life. The organic litter gives it the nourishment it needs to fruit and to yield the beautiful mushrooms you see in the mushroom giclee prints like The Sage and in the

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 08

A mushroom picture really only reveals a little bit about the life of the fungus mycelium which produces the mushroom fruit body you see in the picture. A snapshot of the life of the fungus is really a good term. Because the mushroom itself is merely the fruiting body of the mycelium, taking a mushroom picture shows a snapshot in time - of the time when the mycelium is fruiting, which may sometimes be very brief in a given season. …

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 17

The mycelium which is fruiting and producing the mushrooms at the time of a mushroom picture may be anything from a relatively new fungus growth to a much older, established fungus. A well established fungus mycelium may stretch over great areas underground or throughout the mass of a rotting stump or log. It is particularly dramatic to imagine the hidden mycelium of a fungus in a huge redwood stump or log where one sees them within the vestiges of the old growth redwood forests and within the remains of the forests left after decades of ruthless logging. …

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 18

If conditions are right, the fungus will continue to grow over many many seasons. This fact that the mushroom is just the fruiting body, and not the long-lived organism itself, is why if you are out mushroom picking, and you are very careful to remove only the mushroom and not disturb the underlying fungus body (the mycelium) you should be able to return again to the same spot for more mushroom picking the next season. On the other hand, if in your mushroom picking you carelessly uproot the mushrooms by ripping and pulling out the mycelium, you will likely damage the fungus itself, and you may kill it and never find it in that spot again.


Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 18

If conditions are right, the fungus will continue to grow over many many seasons. This fact that the mushroom is just the fruiting body, and not the long-lived organism itself, is why if you are out mushroom picking, and you are very careful to remove only the mushroom and not disturb the underlying fungus body (the mycelium) you should be able to return again to the same spot for more mushroom picking the next season. On the other hand, if in your mushroom picking you carelessly uproot the mushrooms by ripping and pulling out the mycelium, you will likely damage the fungus itself, and you may kill it and never find it in that spot again.


Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 01

Consider for yourself a reasonably distant visual perspective of a wild mushroom. Now imagine removing a troop of 'identical' mushrooms from their surroundings, suspend them from their mycological environment, keep this distant perspective, and visually inspect them in your mind. Although you know that every mushroom is uniquely different from every other, they all appear identical from this perspective. When you remove these mushrooms from their surroundings like this, how closely do you have to examine them to see their differences? However one might like to say it, from this perspective, one can't really say that all the individual mushrooms are clearly unique - in the absense of the visual impact of their surroundings. …

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 03

Mushroom kingdom. Fungus kingdom. Fungi kingdom. Mushrooms, fungi! What's the difference? The words fungus and mushroom or fungi and mushrooms are often freely substituted for one another. Fungi kingdom is mushroom kingdom and likewise mushroom kingdom is fungi kingdom. Common usage often doesn't really distinguish much between the two terms mushroom and fungi, but there is a difference. Properly speaking a mushroom is a fruitbody of a fungus. When you inspect a wild mushroom or a troop of wild mushrooms, you may never see the underlying fungus at all. It may be hidden under the soil or concealed out of sight inside the bark of a tree or stump from which the mushrooms spring forth. …

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 02

The fungi kingdom, or mushroom kingdom, makes up its own kingdom because fungi are not animals, and fungi are not plants. Fungi and mushrooms do not photosynthesize and instead derive their energy from the decaying organic matter which supports them. This means they are not dependent upon the sun like most plants. This doesn't mean that all wild mushrooms grow in dark caves, however. For many fungi and wild mushrooms of the fungi kingdom the sun and the warmth it provides are essential to their life cycle. Additionally, many of the fungi kingdom live as parasites to living hosts which require sunlight to grow, and others live in a relationship with sun-loving hosts which is mutually beneficial to each (these fungi are called mycorrhizal fungi). …

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 04

Whether as a photographer you are taking pictures of people, pictures of plants and animals, or pictures of mushrooms, you will always find that you arrive back home at the end of the day with great hopes and expectations, but you may often be disappointed! The advent of digital photography has made the entire process an order of magnitude easier than it has been traditionally with conventional film photography, but it is by no means certain that you will capture a scene's mood and composition as it appears to you when you are photographing it. When you are out taking pictures of mushrooms and fungi, all of the existing problems which the traditional film photographer encounters are still problems to surmount no matter what technology lies behind the lense to capture the light image. …

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 07

Not many of the original pictures of mushrooms I take will make it all the way to become a mushroom watercolor giclee print. There are so many variables involved in just capturing a fine art mushroom photograph that it is always at least very hard and frequently quite impossible to get everything perfect in the field. Sometimes it seems impossible even to capture a body of reasonable pictures of fungi to begin with, and that is just the first step to obtain the original pictures of the mushrooms from which to ultimately make the final mushroom watercolor giclee prints. This is not a unique problem to making art giclee style watercolors of fungi or to fungi art in general.


Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 01

Consider for yourself a reasonably distant visual perspective of a wild mushroom. Now imagine removing a troop of 'identical' mushrooms from their surroundings, suspend them from their mycological environment, keep this distant perspective, and visually inspect them in your mind. Although you know that every mushroom is uniquely different from every other, they all appear identical from this perspective. When you remove these mushrooms from their surroundings like this, how closely do you have to examine them to see their differences? However one might like to say it, from this perspective, one can't really say that all the individual mushrooms are clearly unique - in the absense of the visual impact of their surroundings. Under those circumstances from a reasonably distant perspective, they all appear identical! Every mushroom photograph will be the same. Every derived mushroom print will be the same. Now, mentally place them back in their wild surroundings. Look at one and then another. Imagine the resulting wild mushroom photograph. What now sets each apart from the other is the environment around them. This interplay within the mycology of the mushroom kingdom is often the essence of the 'art' in the wild mushroom art print.

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 03

Mushroom kingdom. Fungus kingdom. Fungi kingdom. Mushrooms, fungi! What's the difference? The words fungus and mushroom or fungi and mushrooms are often freely substituted for one another. Fungi kingdom is mushroom kingdom and likewise mushroom kingdom is fungi kingdom. Common usage often doesn't really distinguish much between the two terms mushroom and fungi, but there is a difference. Properly speaking a mushroom is a fruitbody of a fungus. When you inspect a wild mushroom or a troop of wild mushrooms, you may never see the underlying fungus at all. It may be hidden under the soil or concealed out of sight inside the bark of a tree or stump from which the mushrooms spring forth. Without the fungus, there would be no mushrooms at all. The fungus multiplies when the mushroom releases spores which land in a nourishing spot and germinate.

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 02

The fungi kingdom, or mushroom kingdom, makes up its own kingdom because fungi are not animals, and fungi are not plants. Fungi and mushrooms do not photosynthesize and instead derive their energy from the decaying organic matter which supports them. This means they are not dependent upon the sun like most plants. This doesn't mean that all wild mushrooms grow in dark caves, however. For many fungi and wild mushrooms of the fungi kingdom the sun and the warmth it provides are essential to their life cycle. Additionally, many of the fungi kingdom live as parasites to living hosts which require sunlight to grow, and others live in a relationship with sun-loving hosts which is mutually beneficial to each (these fungi are called mycorrhizal fungi). What does all that mean for someone hunting wild mushrooms for mushroom photography to create wild mushroom art prints from those mushroom photographs? It means that on your search for your elusive wild mushroom art subjects part of your time will be spent shivering while peering into a cold, damp, dark and moldy corner of decaying stumps, but you may also find yourself out in sunny spring meadows or strolling through springtime oak savannas.

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 04

Whether as a photographer you are taking pictures of people, pictures of plants and animals, or pictures of mushrooms, you will always find that you arrive back home at the end of the day with great hopes and expectations, but you may often be disappointed! The advent of digital photography has made the entire process an order of magnitude easier than it has been traditionally with conventional film photography, but it is by no means certain that you will capture a scene's mood and composition as it appears to you when you are photographing it. When you are out taking pictures of mushrooms and fungi, all of the existing problems which the traditional film photographer encounters are still problems to surmount no matter what technology lies behind the lense to capture the light image. Pictures of mushrooms and pictures of fungi also present extra and unique challenges to the photographer.

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 07

Not many of the original pictures of mushrooms I take will make it all the way to become a mushroom watercolor giclee print. There are so many variables involved in just capturing a fine art mushroom photograph that it is always at least very hard and frequently quite impossible to get everything perfect in the field. Sometimes it seems impossible even to capture a body of reasonable pictures of fungi to begin with, and that is just the first step to obtain the original pictures of the mushrooms from which to ultimately make the final mushroom watercolor giclee prints. This is not a unique problem to making art giclee style watercolors of fungi or to fungi art in general.


Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 18

If conditions are right, the fungus will continue to grow over many many seasons. This fact that the mushroom is just the fruiting body, …

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 01

Consider for yourself a reasonably distant visual perspective of a wild mushroom. Now imagine removing a troop of 'identical' mushrooms …

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 03

Mushroom kingdom. Fungus kingdom. Fungi kingdom. Mushrooms, fungi! What's the difference? The words fungus and mushroom or fungi and …

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 02

The fungi kingdom, or mushroom kingdom, makes up its own kingdom because fungi are not animals, and fungi are not plants. Fungi and …

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 04

Whether as a photographer you are taking pictures of people, pictures of plants and animals, or pictures of mushrooms, you will always …

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 07

Not many of the original pictures of mushrooms I take will make it all the way to become a mushroom watercolor giclee print. There are …


© C Ribet 2013