- Hudson Hall at the historic Hudson Opera House is a multidisciplinary performing arts organization and visual arts gallery.

We are sitting here in New York state's oldest surviving theater.

The building was built in 1855 and it was originally built as Hudson City Hall.

The theater upstairs was a town hall.

Susan B. Anthony spoke here three times and Teddy Roosevelt gave a lecture about his adventures in Africa.

The Hudson River School painters showed their work here and many, many more.

Hudson Hall is now a multidisciplinary arts venue, so much more than a theater.

We host a year-round schedule of performing arts but also we have a first floor gallery space and we run free community workshops for youth and adults throughout the year.

So we are thrilled to have photographer David McIntyre's solo exhibition, Walking, in the gallery.

It is a beautiful, engaging, fascinating exhibition of photographs taken in and around Columbia county.

When you experience the photographs, you're not just seeing something beautiful, but you're really taken into nature and share that experience of stopping and pausing.

(mellow music) - Walking at Hudson Hall is inspired by the writings of Henry Thoreau.

He's a phenomenal force, way ahead of his time, and the things he was speaking about 200 years ago, well, 150 years ago about the environment especially are so relevant to the climate crisis we're facing right now.

Nature and essentially plants, they've been around for half a billion years, 500 million years, they turned this rock of a planet into a a place we can inhabit, made the atmosphere, made the soil.

So there's gotta be a sort of inherent intelligence collectively with all that history.

Now, we are very smart, we are very clever.

The things, our innovations are amazing, but I wonder if we've become a little detached from that body of knowledge.

And that's what I've tried to tap into.

(gentle music) They're often about what I thought I saw rather than was actually there.

So we were walking along the rail tracks earlier and if you looked out down the embankment, I noticed a lot of purple flowers.

And in my mind, I saw a lot of purple but it was probably 95% green.

And so a lot of the time what I'm doing is just bringing out that color and amplifying it, and making a solid block of color.

I think one of the ways of explaining it is in the body of work there's 26 pictures, and you're actually looking at thousands of photographs.

There's various processes I've used, most of them designed to sort of get outta my own way to sort of have a chance come into the equation, to lose control as it were.

So sometimes they're layering many, many images up and down as well as in depth.

But I've also done things with, in Photoshop, taking an individual petal and making it into a brush head so you can kind of paint with it and you can change its size.

The one picture that's made with crocuses, I think it's only made with about five or six different crocuses and yet it looks like an entire cosmos of crocuses.

(mellow music) My work in this field has traditionally been a lot darker, and coming from more of an impasse, more in sensing an impasse.

And so in a strange way, I feel that I must have had a little bit of a breakthrough because they are joyful, they are hopeful and I think people are picking up on that.

And it's really not been a thing I've done with my work is bring happiness, but it's kind of nice.

I'm not shying away from it.

(mellow music) Other people have said that they feel quiet.

There's a calming sense to them.

And I think I certainly sense that in making the work.

And I think I mentioned in the first press release that I wrote about the work was it was in counter to the distraction industry that we have right now with our phones, with media.

Well, it's just endless.

I mean, you can't even begin to describe it.

And back in Thoreau's day he talks about being bodily in the woods but his mind is in the village.

And so that was the distraction, thinking about life in the village.

Can you imagine if all we had to worry about was a village, we'd be peaceful beings.