From a commissioned couples photo shoot. I jokingly suggested we go outside and do some shots among the leaves and bare trees, thinking she would say no due to the cold. But she was more than game and we came away with some fantastic shots of her.
November, 2008
First series taken with my new camera, the Panasonic G1. I was doing a shoot in my home and we had her sillhouetted against the window when we realized there was a fire truck in the lonely subdivision on the other side of the park. I asked her to go outside and look at the truck through the top of a broken picket in the back fence. She was a trooper and did so, even though it was windy and cold! I love the pose and the reverse voyeur feeling of the nude looking over the fence at the fire truck.
This collage combines two photos from a shoot I did with a fellow co-worker at the
Restaurant where I worked. The color images in the background of the framed image are
of the SF bay on one side and of the Nevada desert on the other.
There had been a photo of a nude male on the wall in that location and I originally
posed her to be looking at it. But it seemed tacky and I didn’t really like the photo of
the guy so I decided to put an image of my own in its place.
I worked at a restaurant named Eulipia in San Jose, California from 1981-1994 while I was going to graduate school and starting out as a college art instructor. I finally left when I moved to Tulsa to start a new career in Interactive Design.
This collage was a result of a photo shoot with three of my co-workers from the restaurant. We did the shoot in one of their backyards while they were sunbathing on a hot summer day. I had been creating a series of collages that used body part close ups combined with sky or other neutral colored backgrounds.
This collage resulted from having all the photos on my drawing board which was a large door actually attached to two drawing board bases. As I laid them out I started seeing a flow to the images. I originally had only one row, with the body below and the sky above. At that point it seemed like a landscape. But I had a lot of photos from the shoot and I laid out a second row to see if those photos might have a different rhythm and flow to them.
I got the idea to turn the top row over and the blue matched up and became a river in my mind. Then it was just a matter of finding the right place for each photo so the flow of the river was pleasing to my eye.
Day four of my week long series on ‘People of Color’. A regular customer of mine at the restaurant where I worked for many years. I didn’t mean it to be such a flat, graphic image but something about the lines on the sheet and pillow started me in that direction and it slowly built from there. It wasn’t stylistically consistent with my other work at the time, but the subject matter and the stripes definitely were.
I don’t know if she ever saw this drawing or not actually.
Day three of my week long series on ‘People of Color’. Her tattoos sang beautifully together.
This page was filled with questions that I answered by using letter press letters (the
old fashion way, before digital, of graphic designing text with fonts). The model and
I were at the beach in Santa Cruz, California and I took close ups of her against a
cliff to collage. These were from the proof sheet that was made of the shots.
The idea when I took the photos making up this collage was to get my client up against
one of her favorite pieces of furniture, a large armoire / wardrobe closet. Later, when I
cut up the proof sheet into pieces to do a mock up of the piece I realized how
crucifix-like the pose was. This led me to this page and it’s challenge to think about
beauty and pain/hurt together.
This is 4th in the week long series from my ‘Sketchbook with Voices’
that I worked in back in the 80s and 90s.
This is the third in my week long series showing selections from the ‘sketchbook with voices’.
The top two photos were of friends of mine from the restaurant where I worked back in
the 80s and 90s. The bottom photo was a family friend from church. I know what you
are thinking; you took photos of a church friend’s cleavage? What sort of church did
you go to? The answers are yes, I did and it wasn’t the church that was odd, it was
me.
As is often the case the photos had no idea they were destined for each other’s
company. At the time I had a big work table and I would have hundreds of photos on it
at a time, sort of like a person with a messy desk having piles of papers. In this
case the two bigger photos, of the breasts facing up and the cleavage, just happen to
land close to each other on the table at some point. I saw that maybe they would
match up and started to see the heart shape. I found the ROMANCE page shortly
thereafter and it all made sense.
The angel type image at the top just added the final element both compositionally and
thematically to the idea.