Anyone familiar with the Owens Dry Lake south of Lone Pine knows some significant facts about it simply by breathing, especially on windy days. The Los Angeles Department Water and Power lake project is addressing this issue with a major project of salt grass planting and the flooding of large regions of the lake.

An entirely different appreciation of the lake is gained when you fly over it as many local residents have had the opportunity to do over the years. Abstract swirls of color, pink, grey, green and white, make the surface beautiful to behold. Straight crystal roads, geometric squares, shimmering pools all add to the effect. It was just a matter of time before a modern graphic artist discovered this beautiful subject and captured the hidden mysterious beauty of Owens Lake from the air.

The artist is David Maisel and his aerial photographs, part of the work entitled "The Lake Project" are now on display at the Miller Block Gallery in Boston. Cate McQuaid, a Boston Globe Correspondent, writes of the project and her reaction to it in the newspaper.

She states" Lake Project 9802-9 (referring to one particular photograph) has the gesture, rhythm and textures of an Abstract Expressionist canvas. The gray bottom portion, gritty and veined, rises into deep inky washes of black bubbled with blue, which ironically recalls waves crashing ashore. This is bone-dry land, though, and you can see the velvety grain of silt in the spacious blue and gray passages along the top."

The critic explains that Maisel flew over the lake in a Cessna plane. By shooting straight down at the lake's surface or at an angle, he was able to avoid the horizon, "homing in on a geological landscape of seething tones and textures." The writer continues, "These photographs look more like abstract paintings than like landscapes, and they take on many of the formal qualities of painting."

David Maisel was born in New York City in 1961. He attended Princeton University and went on to graduate studies at the Harvard School of Design. Various exhibitions of his work have been held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, Benham Gallery in Seattle, LACMA, Schnieder Gallery in Chicago and last year at the Paul Kopekin Gallery in L.A., just to name a few.

His work has been written about in several publications including Aperture Magazine, Camera Arts, New York Times magazine and in The New American Pastoral: Landscape Photography in the Age of Questioning by R Sobieski. Soon "The Lake Project" will be published, in a monograph written by Sobieski, by the Nazraeli Press.

McQuaid titled her article "Salvaging beauty from a valley's destruction," and stated "Devastation can be wrenchingly beautiful, however, as David Maisel's aerial photographs of Owens Valley illustrate."

She goes on to say that the photographs also document some of the work the EPA (sic) has done to bring back the lake and the valley to health. "These images sport the hall mark of any human development on the land: the grid. That's also a handy modernist reference for this melder of painting and photography. 'Lake Project 9281-1' shows a pale gray grid weaving through a field of eerie caked purple ground, speckling at its sandy borders."

The critic concludes, "Here, as in many of Maisel's photos, the otherworldly colors both attract and repel. We know this is not how the earth should look; these are the scars-and the treatment-that humans have wrought. It's shameful, really. And the way Maisel frames and depicts it, hauntingly gorgeous."

Perhaps a local museum or gallery, supported by the LADWP, will bring this exhibit on display locally so we can all appreciate it.