Freshwater Seas

The Katagrafica project
Visual work that starts out as photography, and then is transformed into a visual metamorphosis, a unique way of seeing the world.

Buy our prints with custom framing on BoundlessGallery.com!

Video

by Robert Bethune

The Video blog

Video productions from the world of the freshwater seas of North America.

Music

by Robert Bethune

The Music blog

The Tintinnabulum Project
Explorations of classical and modern music centered around exploring the possibilities of melodic percussion.

Final mixes in progress!

Thank you for visiting! I'd like to take a moment, since you've been so kind to scroll down this far, to introduce myself, what I do, and what this website is all about.

I'm an independent artist. I work in many kinds of digital media, creating works for theater, audio books, photography, video and music that I hope many people will enjoy.

I do translations and adaptations for the stage from the classic literature of the world, including authors such as Pierre Marivaux (The Game of Love and Chance,) Gotthold Lessing (Minna von Barnhelm,) Carlo Goldoni (The Mistress of the Inn,) August Strindberg (Miss Julie and The Stronger,) Federico Garcia Lorca (The House of Bernarda Alba,) and Bram Stoker (Dracula.). I'm currently working on a full translation from the ancient Greek of the Oresteia of Aeschylus.

Audiobooks

I work with Susie Berneis. We've done a volume of short stories by Ambrose Bierce, a full production with musical underscoring and sound effects of A Christmas Carol, a collection of Christmas stories and poems by authors such as Jerome K. Jerome, Louisa May Alcott, Kenneth Grahame, an a collection of seventy poems for lovers by a whole bookshelf of authors. We're working on a collection of ghost stories for the fall.

Imagery

I'm working on what I call The Katagraphica Project. I start with a normal photograph, and then I play with it until it starts changing in some interesting way. I then follow the changes and find more changes, until finally I have an image that might resemble a work of art in traditional media such as watercolor, acrylics or oils, or might look like something done in some medium that hasn't quite been invented yet. In this area, my next project is to apply this approach to theatrical photography, so there will be some interesting crossover there.

Video

I am an independent film producer. I offer DVD versions of several plays I have translated for the stage, including The Game of Love and Chance, The Mistress of the Inn, Minna von Barnhelm, and Miss Julie & The Stronger. I also offer a documentary on the tall ship Picton Castle, taking the viewer on her travels through the Great Lakes.

Music

I am fascinated by harmonic percussion, and the strange and amazing, or amusing, or appalling things that happen when you run classical music through a harmonic percussion ensemble. I call this The Tintinnabulum Project, and I will soon be posting some of the results here. If you'd like to hear Khachaturian done by a steel band, or Bach done by a team of maddened vibes players, this is the place--stay tuned!

How and why I do what I do

I am not much moved by elaborate theories of art. I make things, and I can't help but go on making things; it's easier to do it than not to do it, and besides, the work is there, like Everest was for Edmund Hillary. So I do it! And I have one cast-iron rule: the work must please and provoke me while pleasing and provoking others. If it does that, I'm happy, and I go on to try to do it again!

Click here to visit the Ann Arbor Auditions website: a free service of Freshwater Seas.

Please note: all images on this website are copyright 2001-the present by Robert Bethune, copyright registered with the US Copyright Office, all rights reserved. Anyone may view these images and pages or make copies of them for their own personal use as is allowed under US copyright law. However, I reserve all rights to reproduce or redisplay these images in any medium and by any means. In particular, I do not permit any re-display of these pages or pictures, whether by copying the image to another server, by framing these pages using pages on another server, or by linking to the images on this server in such a way that images or pages from this server appear at the same time or on the same screen as pages or images from any other server. Any such re-display or re-use of these pages or pictures will be treated as a violation of my copyright and I will pursue all remedies available to me under the law to ensure that any such practice ends promptly.

Credits for materials created by people other than me appear here.

My pages about bullpups.