Tag Archives: texture

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 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 09, 2017 – Red White Blue

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“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.

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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 06, 2017 – Latch

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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.

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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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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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