Tag Archives: pattern

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 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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April 11, 2017 – No Parking (graffiti)

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“Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.”
~Man Ray

I know that many young photographers – and many of the masters – are known for their portraits.
Street portraits, especially.

I have quite the collection of faces, to be sure, but I really enjoy documented the forgotten and ignored spaces, the things we tend to intentionally disregard. Man-made environments that man tends to rarely, if ever, wander. There’s a quality to these spaces that interests me.

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April 10, 2017 – Desert Graffiti

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“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place. I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
~Elliott Erwitt

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April 08, 2017 – Message Board

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McNary, Arizona, is only about ten minutes down the road from Pinetop-Lakeside. Unlike the Pinetop community – with curio shops, antique malls, and a well-established network of cabins, resorts, hotels, and restaurants – McNary is a forgotten, depressed community with collapsing buildings, open dumping grounds in the middle of residential neighborhoods, and shuttered shop windows. The population is around five hundred people, eight-six percent of which live below the poverty line.

Here’s one of the old shop signs, covered with graffiti, bulletins, and the faded original paint.

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April 07, 2017 – Abstraction In Red, White, Blue

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“A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.”
~Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965)

This is an image that would fit well into a series I started (and abandoned) a long time ago, consisting of abstract photographs in red, white, and blue, usually of broken, decaying, or aged surfaces. The idealism attached to the colors of our nation’s flag, contrasted against industrial patterns, chipped paint, and scratched surfaces seemed, to me, to represent what we were enduring during the early days of the great recession.

After the housing market crashed and local economies began to suffer, jobs began to evaporate. Construction projects in metro Tucson stopped dead in their tracks. Rent-a-fences sprung up around half-completed housing projects, graffiti proliferated, and I was laid off from my job at a local photography lab and retouch studio. I had some time on my hands, so I started making something of a documentary about the death of the American Dream, and it eventually evolved into something a little more aesthetically pleasing and less overtly depressing.

With this image – and with the image I made for April 1st – I might consider finishing the series.

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April 05, 2017 – Cracked Typography

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“A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”
~Ansel Adams

Simple words, but profound. We live in a world that Adams never could have predicted, where phones have camera lenses that outperform most film cameras from the last hundred years, where every single citizen is in the business of making and distributing images. Now that everybody has access to the technology, and now that everybody practices with social media – facebook and snapchat are the real juggernauts – the photographer is easy to miss, and the photographer is motivated to try and look at the world differently, rather than just document it.

Perspective is everything.
Where you stand is everything.

Everybody is in the business of making pictures now. But not everybody is in the business of making unique images. It still takes determination, creativity, and skill to make memorable photographs. Selfies at the bar are a dime-a-dozen, and there’s a great big world out there.

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February 16, 2017 – No Parking

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Today’s image of the day is simple and clean, but I was attracted to the faded paint and texture. I’m often criticized for making pictures that don’t have meaning, but I think there’s meaning embedded in just about any picture that anybody takes – not just professional photographers or self-proclaimed artists.

So much of the time, I really simply enjoy taking a small detail from the world and printing it big.

“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”
— Diane Arbus

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