I did a photo shoot with her back in 2007 and witnessed what a vortex of activity and energy she
created while she was modeling. I kept having a feeling of watching a human tornado. I took
some photos around the house of objects, windows, etc. and put together this collage that really
seemed to play off this idea.
This is part of a week long posting showing a series I did way back in the 80’s where
I combined photographs of body impressions on top of Impressionist paintings.
This is one of Vince and I. My part of it was taken after wearing a bathing suit
under my pants for an entire day in anticipation of going swimming, which never
happened. When I got back to the hotel with my wife and took off my clothes I had
this incredible impression on my stomach from the elastic and asked her to take a
photo of it since it was so funny looking.
This was the first photo I took about impressions actually, though it wasn’t until I
took a sandal strap impression a few years later that I figured out the connection to
the impressionist paintings.
This is a great example of how I use bad photos. The sandal strap photos turned out
too purple, made the skin look deathly. But when you put them against the slate green
color of the Cezanne painting the purple becomes a perfect color IMHO.
2nd in a week long series showing my ‘Impressionist Suite’ from the mid-80s.
The body impression of a sock on a calf from a friend of mine fit perfectly over this
painting by Mary Cassatt. I loved how the arch of the calf connected the two arms and
created a sort of elongated football shape in the middle of the image.
One of the things I was trying to accomplish in this series was to force the viewer to
see the abstract qualities of the original impressionist painting by covering up the
main subject matter of the painting with the latter day impressionist photo.
This week I am going to show you an early series of mine, one of the first where I
collaged photos onto other material. I had been focusing on photographing physical
memories that showed up on one’s body and I had done a series on tanlines earlier.
Now I focused on body impressions. These were photos I took of parts of the body
having been pressed by something. Maybe a bracelet, or a bra strap or underwear
elastic. Something that left an impression. I then had the idea of collaging those
photos on top of Impressionist paintings. The play on the idea of impressions on
bodies vs. impressions of light in paint appealed to me.
I took it to the point of making the images a collaboration between the original
impressionist artist and myself, titling the works so they included part of the
original title with my new addition and dating the work from the inception of the
original back in the 1800’s to the time I added my photos on top in the 1980s and
90s. Some fellow artists and gallery directors etc. thought that was a bit
pretentious of me, assuming I was equal to the impressionists. But I know this
much….the impressionists themselves would have enjoyed both the fun play on art and
the resulting images.
“A Genius is someone who simply has fewer stop signs in their head.”
Each day for this week and next I am telling about 10 stop signs to creativity that I
have learned about over the years.
Stop sign #2 – It’s not perfect. Answer: According to who? If it is a print and is
too green, blurred, flared, dark, whatever. Then collage it with something that
makes that ‘negative’ stand out. An art piece is not limited to one photo all by
itself. Draw on it, Cut it in stripes and layer it over the same exact shot you
took that is good. Cut the worst part of the image out and tack that bad part on
your wall, look at it, find something in it. Keep tacking up the pad parts until you
find something interesting.
If it is a digital image in your computer, make a copy of it, then do special effects
on it up the wazoo until it is something cool or at least you learned something. Go
to the extreme with each setting, see how far you can take it.
The point is waiting for perfection is an excuse. It shows lack of creativity and
imagination and it shows a worry about what others will think instead of seeing
things through original eyes.
From the ‘Rejection Suite’ 1985-1993
The Rejection Suite – A new week, a new series of old. This one is my ‘rejection letter’ series. I applied
for full-time, college level teaching jobs in fine art for approximately 8 years, from
1985-1993. I never did land that job. I started to take the rejection letters and
collage some of my rejected photos on top of the letter. I let show through from the
letter a word or series of words that had power and meaning out of context.
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.
This is day two of the week long series from my ‘Sketchbook with Voices’ a sketchbook
given to me back in the 80s that had an assignment, idea, or statement about art at the
top of each page.
The assignment was to make something with one hand so instead of using just one hand I
decided I would only have one hand in the collage. I loved the idea of a hard to
recognize hand coming out of a figure with no hands. I was turning the two body parts
into a new, unknown body part.
Another weeklong series. This is from a book given to me way back in the 80s. It is
called ‘Sketchbook with Voices’ and each page was blank for sketching. But at the top
of each page was a statement, idea, assignment, or something else from an artist. I
chose to make the sketchbook my photo sketchbook instead of my regular drawing
sketchbook. I will post a page a day for the next week so you can see some of my faves
from the series.
