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.
