Tag Archives: art

April 09, 2017 – Red White Blue

Posted on by

FINE ART PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE
– – –
OTHER ‘IMAGE OF THE DAY’ PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE

“To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.”
~Edward Weston

I don’t have a lot to say about today’s image. I was on a bike ride through the warehouse district, and I stopped several times to make some pictures. There’s something about these industrial textures that resonates with me, and I don’t feel like spending the time or energy trying to intellectualize it.

There’s something beautiful and perplexing about this kind of imagery to me, so I use my camera to document it.

Notice, of course, that it’s an industrial textured photograph in red, white, and blue, which aligns itself with an old series I never finished about the corruption and death of the “American Dream.” One of these days, I may draft an essay. But for now, I’ll let the images just exist on their own merits.

SEE YESTERDAY’S IMAGE OF THE DAY
– – –
SIGN UP FOR THE LENSEBENDER NEWSLETTER

April 06, 2017 – Latch

Posted on by

FINE ART PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE
– – –
OTHER ‘IMAGE OF THE DAY’ PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE

Somebody designed it. Somebody dug the ore out of the ground. Somebody smelted the ore to separate the metal from other materials. It was liquefied and molded, painted and installed. It’s just a simple latch – nothing more and nothing less. But the material likely circled the world a couple of times before it wound up affixed to the back of a delivery truck on the loading dock of a grocery store in Tucson, Arizona.

And I really do find it kind of remarkable – the sheer complexity of it. I also think that there’s an elegant beauty to all of the little things we, collectively, have invented, designed, assembled, and put to use. The average person doesn’t understand how tumblers work in a simple door lock, and I saw an incredible TED Talk where the presenter asked people in the audience to please illustrate precisely how a zipper works. These are things we use every single day, and we take them completely for granted.

Take a closer look at the objects you interact with every single day, and think about where they came from, and how they came to be in your possession. You might just appreciate what you have a little bit more, and you might just find yourself marveling at how we, as a species, have arranged our world.

SEE YESTERDAY’S IMAGE OF THE DAY
– – –
SIGN UP FOR THE LENSEBENDER NEWSLETTER

April 04, 2017 – Reflections

Posted on by

FINE ART PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE
– – –
OTHER ‘IMAGE OF THE DAY’ PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE

I have no idea what to say, other than I’ve probably made a hundred different versions of this image, none of which I’ve ever really been satisfied with. Distorted reflections are just one of those things that photographers gravitate towards – kind of like dramatic portraits with window blinds casting shadows across the face.

Now that I live within walking distance of this particular building, I’ve taken up the habit all over again. For whatever reason, though, I actually enjoy how this particular image turned out. The combination of the clouds, the odd tinting in some (but not all) of the windows, and the warped street lamp – I dunno, it just works for me.

SEE YESTERDAY’S IMAGE OF THE DAY
– – –
SIGN UP FOR THE LENSEBENDER NEWSLETTER

April 03, 2017 – Perspective

Posted on by

FINE ART PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE
– – –
OTHER ‘IMAGE OF THE DAY’ PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE

Today’s image comes from a long walk I took along the Rillito River; there’s a walking path along the wash that cuts east-west across the northern area of midtown Tucson. There’s something to be said about walking along a nature trail and seeing these massive, man-made structures of concrete, steel, and rebar. To me, the straight line is a marvelous symbol – it’s the exact opposite of nature.

The trajectory of perfectly straight lines does exist in nature, but this kind of vector doesn’t occur because of the presence of other influences. For instance, trees would grow perfectly straight, but shifting soils, uneven distribution of nutrients, wind, and other naturally-occurring factors produce randomly mutated fractal patterns.

Day three is over, and ‘Abstract April’ continues tomorrow.

SEE YESTERDAY’S IMAGE OF THE DAY
– – –
SIGN UP FOR THE LENSEBENDER NEWSLETTER

February 02, 2017 – Chemical Reaction

Posted on by

chemicalcoolpost

FINE ART PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE
– – –
OTHER ‘IMAGE OF THE DAY’ PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE

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.

SIGN UP FOR THE LENSEBENDER NEWSLETTER

January 29, 2017 – Burning Flags

Posted on by

burningflagspostFINE ART PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE
– – –
OTHER ‘IMAGE OF THE DAY’ PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE

No, this is not a photograph of a flag. But for me, in the editing room, as I sculpted the image’s contrast and color, it began to remind me of the American flag, with a chipped-paint and rustic, aged texture. More than a week after the inauguration of Donal Trump, and all of the chaos that has followed after his controversial executive orders and the backlash from civil rights advocates, this image became a symbol to me of the erosion of American ideals.

As I have said about my other abstract compositions, there is beauty in simplicity – this image can mean any number of things to any number of people. But for me, this image is a meditation on America.

I would be curious to know what you think of this image, what your interpretation might be.

– – –

“There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term ‘conservatism’ can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country’s future.”

― Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism

SIGN UP FOR THE LENSEBENDER NEWSLETTER

January 24, 2017 – Coffee Break

Posted on by

coffeecan-postrFINE ART PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE
– – –
OTHER ‘IMAGE OF THE DAY’ PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE

This is a photograph that I made while hiking around Bisbee, Arizona back in 2011. I was in the company of several friends, all journalists, and we had traveled to Bisbee to take a few days off after covering the horrible shooting incident involving Representative Gabby Giffords. We were working around the clock during that news cycle, attending press briefings and funerals, and submitting our photographs and our reports. It was a much-needed getaway after absorbing the tumult of that incident and its aftermath.

Interestingly, coffee is what brought me to Bisbee the following year. I managed to secure a job roasting coffee for a local Bisbee coffee roaster. It was a good few years, living in the bosom of the Mule Mountains. And I will never think about coffee the same way again, after learning the origins, the history, and the processes involved in harvesting, hulling, and roasting America’s number one beverage.

SIGN UP FOR THE LENSEBENDER NEWSLETTER

Save

January 03, 2017 – Muddy Stream

Posted on by

201701-03-blog

FINE ART PRINTS AND MERCHANDISE AVAILABLE HERE
– – –
FOLLOW LENSEBENDER ON INSTAGRAM

Textures – a long obsession of mine.
Without spending too much time being overwhelmingly boring, I will say that I have spent weeks – probably months – of my life with a macro lens in my hands and earbuds piping music into my brain, photographing cracks in pavement, tree bark, broken patches of clay-rich earth, rusty garbage containers, and just about anything you can find on a rusting old car or in a back alley, in order to expand my collection of texture images.

My library is extensive.

Some of these images are used to add grit and texture to other photographs I’ve taken (as overlays and double exposures). Some of them reveal themselves to be stand-alone pieces. The image above just so happens to be one of those stand alone pieces. While hiking through the rain-drenched red mud of Sedona, Arizona, there was a moment when I realized I had been paying too much attention to the mountains towering over me – that’s what always captures people’s attention – and I needed to take a moment and start looking around.

So I trained my lens on the ground, rather than the high peaks. To the streams and the insects, the animal tracks and the budding cacti, rather than the red rock spires that dominate the landscape. And this is what I got – a portrait of the tiny little stream, the stream that traveled a long distance from a large rock formation, from a mist of rain, to soak into my boots and ensure that my feet would be wet and itchy all day long.

Small price to pay to be reminded how beautiful the world is.

The details, the small little things? They really are beautiful. And they really do matter.

“The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present.”
~Paul Scott

SIGN UP FOR THE LENSEBENDER NEWSLETTER

Glitch Art – It’s A Thing

Posted on by

Glitched August postFINE ART PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE

– – –

Glitch art. It baffles me that this isn’t something that managed to capture my attention sooner. In a lot of ways, it has, but I didn’t recognize it at the time. The album art from Nine Inch Nails, a decade ago, with the release of the album “With Teeth” represents this artform, I think. But then, in the age of the internet, there’s so much that slips through our fingers. I was recently listening to an interview with Whitney Moore – an obscure media personality and the star of such ‘high-end’ cinema as “Birdemic” (an incredibly low-budget slosh, self-aware and celebratory for it’s obscene garishness) that added fuel. When asked what her favorite art is, Miss Moore answered (reactively, and without a moments hesitation) with a simple, two word remark: Glitch Art.

And Whitney’s no loser. She’s a smart commentator on creative media. She is an insightful voice with a pretty face, and likely not taken seriously because of that pretty face (and her proclivity for making YouTube videos while less-than-sober). Nevertheless, I hadn’t heart the term. And ‘glitch-art’ and ‘data-moshing’ are not the most recognizable terms, at least not in the circles I travel. Naturally, I started sifting through the terminology. Isn’t Google a remarkable resource?

In a technical sense, a glitch is the unexpected result of a malfunction. The term was first recorded in 1962 during the American space program by a gentleman named John Glenn when he described problems they were having. He explained, “Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electric current.”

Data-moshing, which I would suppose is the current way of saying “intentional glitching,” is a relatively new term. We have examples of “circuit bending” in audio recording, and I think that “data-moshing” is the commensurate term (in light of audio-engineers) to image-manipulation. What’s appealing about the practice is that the effects are unpredictable and randomized. The artist is present, but his (or her) intentions are violated by the practice itself. Accidents are acceptable, invited, and celebrated.

There are a variety of ways to “break” encoded visual data. Artists have taken scripted data – text documents of encoded pictures – and fed them into audio engineering programs in order to “listen” to their photographs. The reverse has been done, too. And one of the more popular experiments, it seems, is writing visual data – be they cell-phone pictures, digital photos, Microsoft Paint drawings – into the BitMap file format, opening the file in a text editor, and manipulating or deleting entire lines of code, just to see how these manipulations register when the data is opened back up with an imaging editor (like Photoshop) after being altered in a text-editor (like notebook or Wordpad).

Not all of these experiments yield anything worth looking at. Digitally breaking a document is a grab-bag, mixed-blessing practice. But sometimes something interesting happens. And it’s that unpredictable, random, unimagined result that artists like me crave. Being forced into reinterpreting a perfectly normal, easily understood image – it forces an entire aesthetic re-imagining. Most artists pre-visualize – which is to say that they have an idea of what they want, and then create it. But sometimes, I find, it’s valuable to have one’s vision completely savaged. The concept, tone, and nature of a piece can be altered entirely.

Sometimes for the better.

I imagine I will be pouring over code and tinkering with these scripts, over and over, hoping for a new and expressive result. Like I said, it’s a grab-bag. It’s random. But soft, banal imagery is given a second life when they’re broken. And I could spend hours, days, weeks, tinkering with the code to see what happens. Script-sculpting is my new favorite past-time. Won’t you join me?

FINE ART PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE
– – –
SIGN UP FOR THE LENSEBENDER NEWSLETTER

Geometric Art, Color, and Heavy Metal

Posted on by

Mandala WP PostFINE ART PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE

Growing up I listened to a lot of Tool, a progressive metal band that some of you may be familiar with and some of you may not be familiar with. I still listen to my old albums. The percussionist, Danny Carey, heralded from a local community here in Kansas, giving us mid-western backwater hicks some prestige. I’ve spent my entire career as an artist trying to explain to people that the “fly-over” states are filled with creative artists and political malcontents, too.

Midway through their career, Tool began incorporating works form artist Alex Gray – anatomical cross-sections, repeating patterns, and other evocative images intended to illustrate the connection between body and spirit – into their albums. The images rely heavily on the symbolism of the third eye and chakra charts, but they also weave this content into renderings reminiscent of anatomy textbooks, esoteric symbols, and studies of celestial bodies. It’s really cool stuff.

At one point or another, after looking at all of that great art (and probably after watching Martin Scorsese’s film Kundun, and after attending a talk with the Dali Lama at the Tucson convention center), I really wanted to make a mandala. There are countless designs out there, but I’d never made one of my own and, frankly, I didn’t know the first thing about making a design like that. I’m pretty confident that I still, for the most part, still don’t. Nevertheless, I nabbed my metal ruler and protractor and took to making some of the most god-awful radial line-drawings the world has ever seen (except, of course, that the world never saw them – I threw ’em all away because, well, they were terrible).

I have, of late, taken the practice up again. It’s a great meditative practice. It’s complicated and simple at the same time, mathematical and symmetrical, but layered with compositional complexity. Today’s image is my first shot out of the gate – I know I can make more interesting images, but I’m very pleased to be back in the saddle and experimenting with these designs. I’m already working on others, which I will share once they’re done.

I’m “getting my zen on,” as an old friend from the San Rafael Valley would say. The repetition, the tedious nature of making pictures like this, open doorways in the mind. These compositions require a certain kind of concentration to make, but they’re also ordered, logical, straight-forward. The perfect kind of exercise for any creative personality who isn’t feeling any other specific drive; it’s a way of exercising the brain and being creative when one is feeling stifled, uninspired, or otherwise “blocked.”

The trick is to keep the pen moving. This is how I keep moving. I hope you like it.

FINE ART PRINTS AVAILABLE HERE
– – –
SIGN UP FOR THE LENSEBENDER NEWSLETTER