I have been creating black and white compositions that deal with visual perception and optical trickery. I seem to be channeling the early 1960’s work of painter Bridget Riley (which is a good thing). She is brilliant and I love her early black and white and even color op-art… I then decided to see what happens when I combine two of my compositions in an animated video. I call it A+B because that equals “see”.
I spent yesterday photographing at Olde Good Things with some friends, an antique and architectural lot in Scranton, PA. I was browsing through my images today and decided to grab an image of a carved wall and play around in Photoshop for a while in order to really change it and bring parts out… The end product is a bit strange. Some kind of portal or ancient machine.
Just spent the day walking around New York City for the first tiem in over 10 years. We visited the tree, holiday markets, a pizaria, and of course the MOMA (Museum Of Modern Art)… I brought along my dSLR with the idea of making a series of photographs looking up at tall buildings, but without ever looking through the camera. I suppose it was some kind of strange conceptual project. I mean, who goes to NYC with a camera and blindly makes photos of the sky? Me… Here are a few of the images.
Who doesn’t love art that you spin! Designed by transforming octagons in Photoshop, printed onto a metal plate, cut out into a circle, and mounted onto the wall for the viewer to spin and watch. I like the idea of art being an interactive thing, and this is one idea that if pushed farther (scale, lighting effects) could really be an interesting find in a standard gallery space.
I am alphabetizing an array of ashes for art… The other day I realized that I did not currently have the budget to finish a project idea that I had begun. See, I am photographing items, burning them, and using their ashes to make photographic prints. This can get pretty costly in materials, so, instead I created a nice spreadsheet that corresponds to these little containers of ashes. Once the budget comes in I will get back to work.
I have recently become obsessed with squares for some reason. I begin in Adobe Photoshop with only a single square and then use very simple procedural methods – copy, paste, rotate, blend, scale – to create final complex compositions. I can already see these printed a few feet large. Here are a few so far.
Maurizio Anzeri, “Marianna”, 2010
Interested in the qualities of vintage photographs, Anzeri uses embroidery on top of old found portraits to create almost a surreal-psychological mixed media image. Where the old photographs are soft, the threads are colorful and shiny. They create strange costumes and masks around the figures that also act as auras. I always find and mixing of other media with photography, and this one is very different and successful.
The sunlight reflecting off the early morning frost created a strange sights of little specks of bright hues of color. Reds, and greens, and blues. It was a gorgeous sight, but one that I couldn’t really capture with my camera. I tried but the image always lacked the phenomena I was interested in… that is until I made the image unfocused. I think this is art.
Picked a few mushrooms on my walk. There was a lot of rain the days before, so these fungi were everywhere, especially these types under pine trees. I liked both the tops and the bottoms of the caps and could decide, so here’s both. (PS: Don’t eat these ones)
I have been working on a series of black-light activated multicolored Rorschach blots in my studio. I began this process in graduate school a while back. I hope to make many more and show them in a gallery… The philosopher Alan Watts once said, “Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know!”