Carlisle Visitor Center Art Gallery displaying Ken Long photo exhibit

with last year’s “Limbs and Leaves I” exhibit, which was deemed a success.

Considering Northeast Ohio photographer and digital artist Ken Long loves capturing the beauty of the natural world, there are no better surroundings than Lorain County’s Carlisle Reservation.

After a successful debut solo exhibit last year at the Carlisle Visitor Center Art Gallery, Long returns to the LaGrange venue for another show.

“Considering it’s a nature center, I thought the work I’ve done with trees and leaves would be ideal for that kind of setting for artwork,” said Long, of Rocky River, who previously exhibited his work at Creative Space Avon.

After a peer suggested Long reach out to the gallery, the artist did just that

“It was fairly well received based on comments,” Long said. “Also, I sold three pieces.”

Currently, Long’s “Limbs and Leaves II” appears now through Feb. 28 in the Carlisle Visitor Center Art Gallery.

“There are a couple of pieces from last year that had a lot of comments and people liked,” Long said. “So this year there’s a total of 20 pieces — 18 of which are new.”

The exhibit features images of trees and leaves processed using neural net software to give them a painting-like quality.

“I describe it as digital art, but it starts with a photograph,” Long said. “For most of the artwork, I use something called neural net software, which basically takes the image that you input and combines it with another image.

“They call it a style image so the textures and some of the colors of the style image are transferred over to the original image.”

An active photographer for roughly a decade, Long started experimenting with neural net software about five years ago. He instantly liked the results.

“It kind of takes your work to a different level,” Long said. “It makes it different and new from things that have been out there before. Hopefully it helps them appreciate it more and it brings out the beauty of whatever it is they’re looking at when they see the image.”

At the very least, Long hopes “Limbs and Leaves II” has viewers thinking spring.

“There’s one winter photograph in this year’s exhibit but everything else is spring, summer or fall,” Long said. “That will hopefully cheer people up during the cold month of February.”

More than 600 people signed on to a letter to Oberlin College President Carmen Twillie Ambar calling for Mahallati to be fired in late 2020. The college then hired a law firm to investigate the allegations.

The college’s investigation concluded that the allegations were unproven. Iranian lawyer and 2003 Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and other critics later accused the college of “whitewashing” Mahallati’s alleged crimes in a letter in December.

The results of the investigation are detailed on the college’s website on a page titled “Fact Sheet: Professor Mohammad Jafar Mahallati.”