The sheer volume of detail in a garden changes almost moment by moment and this provides an intense visual meditation, the camera capturing only a fraction of a second in nature's infinite flow. When I am immersed in photographing the beauty of the botanical world, I not only feel great exhileration but have realized it is also a necessity for me: my soul's spiritual survival is fully rooted in nature, where a deep serenity overrides social judgements, fear, and perceived human flaws. Nature is abundant and joyful, reminding

me that I am also that.

TECHNICAL I photograph using a Contax RX 35mm camera with Fuji PRO160 color negative film, natural lighting (fog is a wonderful light filter) and no tripod. My images are printed straight from the negative without cropping, the way I see them through the viewfinder. They aren't altered digitally in any way (though the scans used on this web site are lovingly 'hand' scanned from my own negatives by yours truly).

CURRENT EVENTS   EXTENDED through January 15th: I am sharing space with sculptor Deborah Caperton on the Front Gallery wall at Sea Ranch Lodge. They are closing soon to renovate - which has extended my show there, but left other artists without this venue in 2012. •  At Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery St, SF, an upper mezzanine display of my work including 4 large-scale mounted inkjet prints (40"x60" and 32"x40"). Email me to make an appointment to view if you are interested. • Three of my photos are hanging in the front window of Mama's restaurant, Stockton & Filbert in San Francisco, with many more in the back dining room. I have been asked by Lynn Sanchez, one of Mama's daughters, to hang a regular display of my botanical images in the restaurant because they liven the place up!

FUTURE EVENTS A trip to Thailand to photograph tropical plants is next! I will be spending time in Chiang Mai and Prachuap Khiri Khan, with just a taste of Bangkok at both ends. I am extremely excited to shoot new flora! The elusive 'perfect orchid photo' could happen soon...

RESUME  Please view my resume, which I confess is a little out of date, here. If you are reading this page, you are seeing the most updated info.

ART HISTORY  Hunters Point Shipyard: Building 101, Studio 1201 as a guest of Ed Handelman, on Sat & Sun Oct 29 & 30 from 11 - 6. It great experiencing two days of art lovers checking out my work!! Glad you could be there.

"Nature in the City" premiered at Canessa Gallery on September 1st, a group show including Barb Oplinger, F. Joseph Butler, Mel Solomon, Miriam Owen, Tim Armstrong and Richard Zimmerman, along with my own work. One of our opening night guests said it was the best group show she'd seen in San Francisco. September 24 & 25 was the 4th Annual North Beach ArtWalk and the show enjoyed lots of viewers during the weekend.

A spiny new photo show at the hip FL!PP home design store, 1400 Green St @ Polk in San Francisco, began on August 4th. Not only images of succulents, but the shop has a lovely outdoor garden with live succulents and cacti for sale along with their eclectic and interesting decorator items. Wed - Sun 11 to 6, Mon - Tues by Appointment

 

An Elegant Order: 15 Botanical Pairings runs March 4 - May 6, 2011 at Shenson Memorial Art Gallery at St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco. The show will have no public opening (and I don't even have to put it up myself!). Hope you can drop by and take a look, 8:30am - 5:30pm, Monday thru Friday, especially if you missed the last two shows.

Canessa Gallery Artist Resource 708 Montgomery Street @ Washington & Columbus above Bocadillos. February 1 - 26, 2011. An exhibit of botanical photo pairings interspersed with large prints in a 40 year old gallery in a historic building, a former printing company's space (Peter Koch stopped by the last day to show friends the space, fyi). The opening on 2/4 coincided with North Beach's new First Friday gallery walk which made for an enthusiastic crowd all evening.

An art salon, "Garden Epiphanies" happened the evening of 2/23. Participants included Betsy Flack of the Garden Conservancy; Judy Irving, filmmaker; Zach Stewart, architect and activist; Tedd Kipping, arborist and polymath; Miriam Owen, artist and former Chronicle garden writer, and a dozen more people. A donation of over $100 from the proceeds was sent to the Helen Crocker Russell Library at Strybing Arboretum.  

My second solo show at San Francisco Botanical Garden's Helen Crocker Russell Library of Horticulture opened on September 1st and ran through December 31st, 2010. "Nature's Geometry: Surprises of Botanical Design" was inspired by photographing the buds of a Crown of Thorns plant one foggy day at Pier 39. I had never really looked closely at this plant before, but here was a group of buds set up in a 4x4 grid like something out of a math book. Sadly, in August the librarian, Barbara Pitschel, passed away: please read here about her long career at Strybing. She and her attentions to the art shows at the library will be sorely missed (though Brandy is doing a great job!). Opening was 9/9/10 at the library. Purchases of my photos during the show benefited the library.

City Hall and five Supervisors host art. We were dazzled under the rotunda, then we saw the reality of art squeezed into small spaces with a lot of desks! Offices were open to the public unless a meeting was in progress @ SF City Hall, One Dr Carleton B Goodlet Place, 2nd Floor. I and 3 members of my art committee were chosen (along with others, I must admit) to hang art in Supervisor David Chiu's Office, ending September 12th, 2010. Very cool!

Hotel des Arts  SCREAM, iNC. hosts over 20 artists and 100 pieces of art in the halls of Hotel des Arts on four floors. 50 rooms are already works of art and every guest is an art patron. Five of my botanical images were nestled on the third floor through last September.

"Succulents" -Pat Wipf and Julie Jaycox, 2223 Restaurant @ 2223 Market St @ Sanchez. June & July 2010.  Pat Wipf does gorgeous large-scale pastel drawings of succulents - so large that I needed to step in and hang my photos where her pictures couldn't fit. It was the first split show (2 artists) for the restaurant, and also the first photographic art chosen in a long series of nature art for the restaurant.

"Botanicus Intimicum: A Loving Look at Nature" was a flash in the pan at Canessa Gallery in April. My botanical images alongside beautiful mixed media paintings by Magué Calanche hung just under two weeks. At the opening party we very much enjoyed live music by Ned Boyntan and Dave Newman, a first for me at my own opening. http://www.nedboynton.org/

"Photo Florilegium" was up at Brioche Bakery, 210 Columbus Ave, SF, from November until January 2009.

"Green", a photographic window installation, hung at 1427 Grant Ave in San Francisco, 10/15 - 11/15, courtesy of Jim & Marti Schein at Schein & Schein Antique Maps & Prints right next door. I was in attendance the weekend of the North Beach ArtWalk, Oct 24th & 25th, 2009.

Canessa Gallery was all mine, "Outside In" July 6th thru 31st, 2009, 708 Montgomery St, San Francisco. Thank you, Zach.

May 1st - July 3rd, 2009, my work was hanging in the St. Francis Foundation's Shenson Memorial Gallery at St. Francis Memorial Hospital at 900 Hyde Street in San Francisco. The sales of my photographs included a donation to the St Francis Foundation.

Integrated : spiritual survival at Collectively Grasp Environmental Art Gallery, 850 Greenwich Street, SF. Aileen Meehan and I curated the photos for a beautiful and interesting combination of images. I had an especially skilled friend mount the prints (thank you, JK!) and they were hung unframed for close-up viewing. The large giclée prints looked amazing. They are 40"x 60" blown up from a TINY 35mm negative scanned by Urban Digital Color's great technicians. I showed just one at my Open Studio last fall, but this show had four! December 11 - February 14, 2009

Twenty of my photos hung at Artemis Healing Center, an intimate acupuncture and massage center in Los Altos, CA, from December 5th, 2008, until early March 2009. Thank you, Tatyanna.

Loren Simpelo graciously lent me his display window to showcase my photography for my Open Studio at Simple Design with the red door, 1254 Mason Street, San Francisco (between Washington & Jackson across from the Cable Car Museum), October 25th & 26th, 2008. October's Open Studios had a new group of artists linked by the North Beach Art Walk, with all art, poetry and musical endeavors mapped by the Telegraph Hill Dwellers Arts & Culture Committee. The pairing of local business owners and artists was to foment even more artistic activity in the neighborhood. It was the best time I'd had in a long time with Kim Frohsin's Sidewalk Sale going on next door and Candace Loheed at New Orangeland keeping me happy with the Proseco!

"Serenity III " was up until October 21st at UCSF Center for Reproductive Health at 2356 Sutter Street, SF. Matt McKinley of McKinley Art Solutions curated the show. My work was displayed on the 3rd floor in the 'J' hallway with more art on 7. The building itself has a beautiful California-style interior garden and the entrance hall is lined with tactile and colorful tiles imprinted with live botanicals and inscribed with poetry or thoughts on loved ones who have been ill. I enjoyed these as much as the art show upstairs.

"Spines", with nine out of twelve images never exhibited before, was hanging at the Chameleon Café on Russian Hill for two months, August through October, 2008. The laptop crowd regularly faced away from the art, but the beautiful spiny images behind them looked just great on the gray wall, like a French café. Thank you, Melody, for the opportunity.

I participated in Vesuvio's Special Edition of Art in the Alley for their 60th Anniversary on Sunday, October 5th, 2008. The weekend was full of musical and poetical events, and the day I was there had many local North Beach artists sharing space with a variety of musicians and audience.

Sunday, September 21st, found me at the Fort Mason Community Garden's Garden Gala. I showed and sold my matted photos of the garden, and donated to the silent auction. The food was great, especially the champagne, in such an incredible setting, the garden lush and beautiful this time of year! I spent an afternoon last week shooting dahlias and roses and lavender there, plus my usual close-ups of the unusual parts of plants that most people never notice.

My friend, Dana, graciously donated a space surrounded by garden for an Open Studio in October 2007 here in North Beach. I enjoyed the visits by friends and a few new faces, including someone living next door who said, "I take pictures similar to these." I smiled, thinking what he really meant was a once-a-year vacation photo shoot at the park with the family surrounded by flowers, but when I was formally introduced to Sid Hollister at his solo show at Canessa Gallery a month later, I saw that he really DID take pictures similar to mine!

My solo show at The Helen Crocker Russell Library of Horticulture at the San Francisco Botanical Garden in July, August and September 2006, was wonderful and I enjoyed everyone I worked with there through the entire process. I truly felt like a talented artist with the lovely responses I received from everyone who viewed the show!  JaycoxSFBGpage

My botanical photos were first exhibited at Vesuvio's on Columbus Avenue in June 2005 (thank you, Conrado), and I have shown a variety of photographic images in venues around the U.S. and Europe, including group shows at The San Francisco Women's Art Gallery, MASS MoCA, and Light Impressions Corporation gallery in Rochester, NY.

HISTORY I was born here in California, and moved back in 1997 where camellias, magnolias and iris bloom in the wintertime, and where my photography and I have thrived. I grow my own cacti and succulents on my roof because of their beauty and because of their skill at surviving my occasional neglect.
I want to keep using film because I love the detail in the focus AND the way it loses the detail when out of focus. It also allows me to print very large without pixelation, an amazing expansion from such a small negative (I printed 40 "x60" from a high quality oil-contact drum scan and the details are phenominal). Therefore, my search for a new photo printer has been educational. There are no small businesses offering optical/chemical prints that I have been able to find (the old way), now digital/chemical is the norm. I have actually found a place that prints my images less like cartoons and more like the photos of growing things that they are, but many digital printers I've tried tend to push the colors way beyond reality.

You sure get a lot of mileage out of leaves, Julie. ~Patty Callahan, 2008 Open Studio, San Francisco