Tag Archives: abstract

April 01, 2017 – Abstract April

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Another month has begun, and I’m excited to start working on some new images. I had a lot of fun last month digging through old, neglected, previously unpublished images from my many journeys to Mexico, but this month gives me the opportunity to start making new images. No more dusting-off the old – I intend to bring my camera everywhere I go and make brand new pictures every day, beginning with this one.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and abstract art doesn’t necessary stimulate everybody, but I thoroughly enjoy looking at the world through the camera lens, studying the details that would otherwise go completely unnoticed. That’s what this month is going to be about – peering through the macro lens and looking for the textures and details that we often never notice. It should be a pretty good time.

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March 10, 2017 – It’s A ‘Sin’

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While wandering around in Creel, Mexico, I gathered tons of images of posters, signs, storefronts, and interesting garbage. This one, obviously, is a play on words, as ‘sin’ in Spanish simply means ‘without,’ which is a radical departure from the English ‘sin.’ Nevertheless, I found the textures and layers of this weathered advertisement really dazzling. I know that minimal and semi-abstract imagery isn’t everybody’s particular cup of tea, but I know that there are some of you out there who understand.

I hope you like today’s ‘image of the day’ and scroll through other images from this sprawling project.

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March 01, 2017 – Serial

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As we enter a new month, I’m considering the theme of ‘March in Mexico.’ I have countless images that have never been published from my springtime trips to the Copper Canyon (Barrancas del Cobre) Region the the state of Chihuahua. There’s a unique mix of indigenous tradition and Catholicism, an appreciation for tradition and an embrace of modernity, and there just isn’t any other place on earth quite like it.

To start things off, though? I present to you another semi-abstract image I was tinkering with. Aligned with other monochrome, macro, minimalist images, this is a photograph of a line of numbers hammered into a small piece of plate metal affixed to a wooden light pole. It certainly asks more questions than it answers. The area is roughly the size of a chewing gum wrapper, and it’s one of those easy-to-miss textures and details of daily life. I’m sure that the number refers to a manufacturing spec or is related to inventory or is somehow connected to the area that the product was routed to for installation, but your guess is as good as mine.

I enjoy the texture and contrast, and I don’t really mind the mystery.

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February 22, 2017 – Old Car

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Today’s image comes from Opera Drive, a winding road on one side of the canyon known to local Bisbee, Arizona residents as Brewery Gulch. There’s new money in the old mining town, and some old money – but mostly there’s no money. Anybody who walks far enough up Brewery Gulch will see the junk houses and the yards filled with splintered lumber, old tires, bathtubs, and rusted cars. The paved road terminates, giving way to a gravel pathway with sharp rocks and small remnant shacks from the old mining days, when Bisbee produced more copper than any other mine in the United States.

Up on Opera, looking down on the gulch, are houses perched on the hillside – some little more than remnant shacks, others renovated by the nouveau riche. Regardless of income or social standing, the views are just the same, and always fantastic. I made this picture of an old car parked on the roadside while I was hiking up to the end of the gulch, where the road splits into a couple of hiking trails that wind around into the surrounding hills in the high desert.

“The goal of abstract art is to communicate the intangible, that which eludes the photograph and normal seeing.”
~Curtis Verdun

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February 21, 2017 – Textures on the Trail

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My fondness for abstract photography is inexhaustible. This image was made in the open spaces of the San Rafael Valley, in Southeastern Arizona, in a small and underutilized ranch. This is a piece of farm equipment captured in my camera’s macro lens. There’s something about the texture of rust and chipped paint that I’ve found beautiful and fascinating, like a small little landscape the size of a human thumbnail.

“I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed imagination with a world built through the basic sensations.”
~Jean Helion

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February 13, 2017 – Alvernon Plaza

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When I was in college, almost ten years ago now, I used to go on what I would call “urban hikes.” I would put my headphones on, tethered to my Discman (yeah, before iPhones and iPods) in my backpack. I would listen to music and walk for miles around town, looking for interesting things to photograph. I would look for cracked paint, old signs, compelling shadows, and every category of garbage tossed into back alleys.

I went urban hiking today, to the tune of about ten miles, just walking around midtown with music in my ears. It was a great diversion. I had forgotten how calming and meditative this practice had once been for me, and I think I’ll be doing this more often, now that I’ve moved back to Tucson and life is starting to make sense again.

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February 05, 2017 – Textures On The Trail

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One of my favorite things to do is train my camera on the ground. It’s painfully easy to walk around your own neighborhood and find absolutely nothing interesting. And hell – It’s completely natural for the places we spend the most of our time to become completely innocuous to us. Looking through the camera lens is a way to help renew one’s vision. There are amazing things all around, just waiting to be discovered. You just have to have the eyes and the right mindset to see.

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

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February 02, 2017 – Chemical Reaction

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This is about as abstract as abstract photography gets. In fact, this image could hardly be called photography, save for the fact that it was constructed using photographic paper and photo developing chemicals. Beyond photography, I woul venture to describe these kinds of images as “chemical paintings.”

Anybody who has worked in a darkroom knows that, at one point or another, the artist is going to accidentally expose an entire box of photo paper – and once light hits your photo paper it’s useless to draw traditional prints from.

I began to experiment with photo paper, using paintbrushes to paint photo developer onto ruined paper to see what kind of patterns I could create. In this instance, I took exposed paper (which would simply turn pure black if submerged into developer), and poured india ink into the developing bath, expecting the milky clouds of ink to slow the light from penetrating through and altering the final result. I would then lift the partially developed print and dunk it immediately into the fixer bath to stop the developing process in its tracks before the whole print turned solid black. I wound up with a serious of these nebulous abstractions, which I would then apply colored dyes to.

I really enjoy how this series turned out. I would love to know what you think of the image, and the process.

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January 31, 2017 – No Parking (america)

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This is another image from my “Compositions In Red, White, And Blue” series. It was taken standing on the rooftop of my old apartment building on Subways Street in Bisbee, Arizona. Looking straight down, and through the lens of my camera, this composition jumped out at me.

I’m not entirely sure what it means. But I like the way it looks.

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January 30, 2017 – How I Hated Mondrian

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Unless you went to art school, chances are good that you don’t know who Piet Mondrian was. He was born in the 1870s and contributed to a European form of proto-cubism that is known De Stijl. The only contemporary iteration of this term that I can think of is the The White Stripes album of the same name, with cover art that mimics Mondrian’s style.

de-stijl

I was introduced to this artist as a child. My elementary school art teacher, Mr. Clinton, showed us all kinds of art from various periods, and brilliantly made projects for us built around these influential artists.

There are people who look at the works of Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, and even the later works of Pablo Picasso, and think to themselves “What’s so damn special about that? Even I could do that. My kids could do that!” I had a similar attitude, especially about Piet Mondrian. Right angles, always primary colors, blocks of paint. To this day, I still don’t understand what his motivation might have been, but I have begun to understand what a personal artistic compulsion is. I find myself gravitating toward subject matter that many of my viewers find utterly boring, banal, and insignificant, but I can’t stop myself from making these images. Art is deeply personal to the creator, and only personal to a select few of their audience – and there’s no way of predicting what colors, compositions, or themes are going to resonate with the audience.

I’m still not a huge fan of Piet Mondrian, but I don’t disregard his work as amateur, pedestrian, or boring – not anymore. He was a driven artist, and influenced a generation of artists that followed, even if his influence was a subtle and often overlooked one.

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