Fertile Image Working Surface

The new to me Mac Pro

Got the new to me Mac Pro up and running ...... and also images of Gwen from at least a year ago are still inspiring me.

One of Those Kind of Days

I've had one of those days that come along every now and again when I plan (should) be doing something else but end up in the studio and something comes out that I hadn't expected at all. The creation of this piece speaks to one of my ways of working that involves long deliberation. The central photograph in the composition was taken almost a year ago but never left my mind. It just sat on my desktop while I was doing other things, deciding whether it was enough as just the photo as shot or would I do something else with it. Here is what I did with it that nakes it both hers and mine. 

UNMOVED 2012

Thoughts About Photography & Reality

Am I The Only One Here? 2009

Photography presents a gift and a problem for our society. The gift is the ability to document events and places for people to refer to that can then aid in expanding their vision of the world, but the strikingly literal representation that photographs portray can often mislead us into arriving at conclusions that are less than factual. The photograph (unlike a painting) depicts its subject so clearly as to give the illusion of reality when nothing could be further from the truth because the truth of any circumstance can only be derived when context is part of the equation. The split second that is portrayed in a photograph without surrounding context, at best can only pose questions about the scene or people involved. It is never the answer. Therefore photographic recording is truly always an art form and not the stoic method of documentation that it is often thought to be.

In many of my photographs I purposely seek to interrupt the illusion of reality by adding things or using devices that deny the truth or illusion of reality of the scene depicted.  I am curious about finding other ways to explore the interrupting of percieved photographic reality even further as I continue to produce photographic art.   

Making Art and Thinking and Stuff

Some time ago an art critic in Atlanta said that I wasn't a painter but a person who thought a lot who just happened to paint. Well I don't think my photographs are turning out any different. I'm always doing things to them, trying to say some things I've been thinking about .... and at the same time violating the art form I'm using in the process. Writing on pictures, typing on pictures, just making marks on pictures .... a lot of the time without any real consistency ... just working with the moment ... what ever strikes me. 

The three pictures below are examples of what I mean. They are from a time when I was running around in cemeteries a couple of years ago taking pictures and thinking a lot about how we like to know the details about murder (real or fiction) and dead people (whether we know the victims or not) and at the same time don't like to talk about death and dying but feel like we must ritually memorialize dead flesh when people we've known leave us alone to face life without them. Human beings are amazing ... walking and talking and thinking and making up stories and everything else.   

Renewal 2010 - 2011

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.  ~Leonardo Da Vinci

Woman At Gravesite with Stripe 2009 -2011

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.  ~Mark Twain

Cemetery Bullseye 2011

God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled.  ~Author Unknown

 

Singing Man

Still from a set of street videos I'm working on ..... a little of this and a little of that

The Work of Paola Ventura

 
This afternoon I was introduced to the work of Paola Ventura a miniaturist and photographer whose  photographs are both subtle, beautiful  and haunting in nature. Here is a link to his work. Please enjoy. paolaventura.com

 

 

Center for Fine Art Photography

UPDATE

I recently found out that the CENTER FORWARD 2011 show that includes one of my conceptual composites, now up at the Center for Fine Art Photography will be traveling to the Denver Colorado Airport in early July and will be there through August.

I recently got an email telling me that I have been included in a show at the Center for Fine Art Photography entitled CENTER FORWARD; a survey of new and current trends in photography. The show opens on May 6th in the centers main gallery in Fort Collins Colorado, so I have to send them a framed print of the picture and consider myself fortunate to be selected from over 2600 images from around the world, ... but it's hard to get really excited with everything that's going on in the world. I also have to include a statement about the photograph and what I have to say about why I made it and what it means to me is even more troubling. So what do I get from showing the work? Is showing the work, no more and no less ... I do wish I was happy about it all right now but I'm not. Maybe I will feel better later.

This is the piece the juror chose:

Untitled 2010

Yasir

Posing near Union Station.

Self Portrait: Exaggerated Yet True

I've had variations of this image in my head since the mid nineties. While I was living in Atlanta I made some drawings that had parts of what I was trying to express but this effort gets closer than I have ever gotten before and I'm sure like many artist I will come back to this subject matter over and over again ... each time hopefully getting closer.

BANDAGED HEAD SELF PORTRAIT 2011

Untitled 2010

I finished this piece last year but had no idea what to do with it because I just couldn't figure out what to call it. Over the past several months I've given it several names, none of which I care to mention here because none of them really fit ... too much was always missing. So it remains untitled even though I think it is time to show it and own it.

UNTITLED 2010