The Unseen Peninsula

Light, the source of life, is the medium of Robert Bueltman's art. His vision is an inspiration. His photographs, like all works of art, are statements about the meanings of life and of art itself.

In this book, Buelteman presents fifty works of art, each one independent of, yet related to, every other. Their link is the place that the artist visited to make his photographs, the Watershed of San Francisco located on the peninsula south of The City. These many acres have for nearly 100 ears been closed to the public to protect the water essential to its survival. Buelteman, however, through perseverance, sincerity, altruism and charm gained access to this secret place, which had intrigued him since his boyhood, when he lived on its edge.

Focusing on modest scenes of nature, Buelteman demonstrates to us that beyond ostensible chaos there exists the same order that we see in nature's grand vista. Even occasional traces of incursions by human beings appear in the artist's works as elements in a larger pattern of order rather than as predatory invasions.

The images in this book are individually unique works of art. Their particularities were occasions for the artist to make statements in his medium. They were not ordered sequentially by chronology, location or subject. Visual rhythms, balances, contrasts and variations guided their arrangement into a larger composition, analogous to a collection of poems or a classical song cycle. What times them together is Buelteman's interpretation of love - sensual, spiritual, intuitive, total, beyond understanding, ancient and yet forever new.