Tag Archives: abstract

April 24, 2017 – Lavender Sunrise

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“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
~Alfred Stieglitz

Capturing a moment in time – it’s one of the most satisfying things that the camera can do in a world that is constantly in flux. Whether it’s capturing an athlete in freeze-frame action – something we simply cannot do with our eyes alone – or locking-in a body of reflective water. We watch the world inhale and exhale around us, constantly, and so very little in the world actually manages to sit still long enough for us to absorb it.

During a monsoon flood in Tucson, I drove south of downtown, where there are warehouses, artist studios, and train tracks. The whole area was flooded, virtually impossible to drive through. I walked around and got my feet wet, and found myself training my camera on the ground, rather than the buildings and textures around me. The rippling water, frozen in time, captured my imagination.

Where one reality ends, another begins. Above the horizon line, static light poles and structures – below the horizon line, ripples of water reflecting everything above. There’s a magic to it, at least to me, and that’s why I’ve never stopped making pictures.

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April 22, 2017 – The Lizard (No. 4)

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“Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.”
~Jim Morrison

I suppose it makes sense to plant a quote from The Lizard King (or Mr. Mojo) at the top of today’s post. It’s not the most profound quote, but it does remind me of the active decisions that artists have to make – to include this and exclude that. Composition – whether visual, musical, or literary – is about making very specific decisions. It’s all an abstract problem-solving exercise.

I made a lot of decisions – invisible to you – about this image, regarding the color saturation, cropping, and texture. A lot of folks think that photographic art is something that requires a snap of the shutter and that’s it. I’ve spent half of my adult life in a darkroom, and learned how to use a number of tools in the digital darkroom. I make all kinds of subtle edits, trying to sculpt a good final product. A lot more time goes into images like this than you might realize.

I hope you dig it.

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April 21, 2017 – More Red White and Blue

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“Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.”
~E. M. Forster

I believe in ‘art for art’s sake’ too. I think that obscure and abstract art objects embody this ideal. There may not seem to be a lot of thought or sense in it, but that isn’t really the truth. There’s action and intention, and there are reasons why people make things. And it isn’t necessary for all of us to know exactly why – sometimes the idea is to wonder why.
I really dig being a part of this.

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April 20, 2017 – Peeling Paint

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“The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.”
~D. H. Lawrence

The intention of abstract art, especially, isn’t the intention of civilizing or moralizing. It’s ambiguous, and speaks to each person differently. Sometimes the themes and the tone are obvious, but not always. Sometimes, it’s color and texture and light, on a print or canvas, and we have to be active participants, making up our own minds about how it makes us feel, what it reminds us of, and what – if any – significance it carries.

Here’s some peeling paint.

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April 19, 2017 – Street Patterns

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“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.”
~Jonathan Swift

This is a photograph of a storefront near the University of Arizona. Cheap Chinese noodles, walking distance from the photography department on the corner of Park Avenue and Speedway Boulevard. And yes, I agree with today’s quote quite a bit. My vision is that anything, any and all visible things, are interesting – and if viewed the right way, from the right perspective, with the right temperament, any and all visible things are exquisite and beautiful.

That’s why I’m in the business of making pictures.

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April 18, 2017 – Abstract Solar Plate

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“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”
~Albert Einstein

This is a scan of a solar plate I produced in a printmaking class about ten years ago. The object itself, I find, holds my interest and wonder more than the prints that I drew from the plate. After being inked and pressed to make a series of prints, the stained metal plate had all of these lovely textures that just didn’t translate onto the paper prints.

The base image? Pretty boring. The aluminum louvers of window blinds, a photograph taken of a shop window while in Bisbee, Arizona during a New Year’s trip with my girlfriend at the time. This is precisely why I love photography – a casual image can be twisted, turned, processed, manipulated into something entirely different. Experimenting with printmaking and photography – both film and digital – and looking at the world through the camera lens, I have learned a whole new way of looking at the world and appreciating it.

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April 17, 2017 – Fields of Light

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“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
~Leonardo da Vinci

Yes, it’s a da Vinci quote, even though most modern folks attribute it to filmmaker George Lucas.

The beauty of photography is that abandonment of the constructed or witnessed moment must, by its very nature, be abandoned. There’s no room for conventional fantasy in photography – the object or scene exists, it is photographed, and it will not be repeated in the exact same way ever again. Models age, landscapes slowly change, perspectives shift. I could try, for one hundred years, to mimic the exact image at the top of this post, and I could get close – but I could never replicate it perfectly.

Photography is the best reminder that time is real, and cannot be stopped (even when captured).

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April 16, 2017 – Paint

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“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”
~Edgar Degas

One man’s vandalism is another man’s art, I suppose. Not that I necessarily condone the act, but I’ve enjoyed finding and photographing all manner of graffiti throughout the years. By photographing these things, I have the opportunity to frame the image, manipulate the saturation and apply subtle edits, and make somebody else’s art into my own – photography is the appropriation of reality, which is alchemical in its own right, and I thoroughly enjoy the process.

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April 14, 2017 – Red White and Blue

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“Nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.”
~Dominique De Menil, Writings on Art and the Threshold of the Divine

Another composition in red, white, and blue. I think I’ve assembled a decent portfolio of these images to produce an editioned series. I’m not quite so presumptuous as the above quote might indicate, but I do think that we live in a cultural environment in which we are all in the business of making pictures. We all have cameras in out pockets, on our phones and on our tablets, and we absorb a tremendous number of images in our day-to-day lives.

Abstract art is one of the easiest ways to divorce oneself from the generic images that flood social media – kids going to their first day of kindergarten, hanging out with friends at the sports bar, going to that wedding. There’s nothing wrong with those pictures, but fine art photographers have been buried by a culture that’s obsessed with making photographs. I’ve enjoyed making abstract and macro compositions, an I like to think that they stand out from the other kinds of pictures we’re used to seeing.

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April 13, 2017 – Abstract Panel

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“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.”
~Pablo Picasso

I like that abstract art asks questions and provides little (if any) answers. It guarantees a unique experience from each individual pair of eyes that look at it. It’s mystifying to some; I’m not so foolish to think that there aren’t people who just do not enjoy abstract artwork. But I would challenge anybody to visit the Mark Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. This was the artist that did it for me.

Looking at photomechanical reproductions in text books, I would go so far as to say that I utterly loathed the prominence and popularity of artists like Mondrian or Rothko. Standing directly in front of one of the canvases, though, is a completely different experience. I was transfixed. Seeing a painting or a photograph on a wall – seeing the actual thing – is different than seeing it in a book and trying to puzzle-out why it’s so damn special. Most Americans will never set eyes on the actual Mona Lisa – it’s referenced in pop culture, in films, and reproduced in coffee-table books and art tomes. And we all have an idea of what it is. Seeing the actual art object, to look at the texture of the canvas that was actually touched by the artist’s hand…that’s a whole other game.

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