When I was five my mother sat me on the couch, played classical music and told me that if I closed my eyes I could “see” the music. I did, and I did. That experience birthed my belief that, as Henry David Thoreau once said, it’s not what you look at, it’s what you see that matters. Photography is my “brush and canvas” with which to render my “vision” of what lies before me, and to choreograph the three-partnered dance between my creative soul, my lens, and the subject. I seek to capture and interpret life’s visual symphonies, one click at a time.
I often explore the theme of “multidimensionality” – a concept that the natural, human-made world, and life itself exist on several levels. Multidimensionality can be created by taking multiple shots of the same subject, which I merge into a single image. Sometimes it is created by reflections in glass, water, or metal that joins or contrasts two or more objects in different planes or spaces. And sometimes, as with the photographs in this exhibit, layers of texture, form, or color presented by the image’s composition create multidimensionality.
These images are close up photographs of peeling paint on the hulls of sailboats in mid-winter. Simple photographs of peeling paint become abstract images, inviting the viewer to derive her or his own emotional reaction, which may be far different from mine. Apparent horizon lines or abstract landscape compositions float before the viewer’s eyes. Although the photographs are always the same, they create different viewing experiences for the innumerable perspectives that come before their surface. Visualized, composed and printed they are no longer peeling paint on a surface; they are abstract revelations amongst decay, framed by a camera lens. It is multidimensionality.
The very subjects of these images are painted by nature. The destructive effects of long term exposure to the harsh, changing winter elements create many varied textures, forms, and shapes which allow me to go beyond merely looking at the boats and to “see” the art they embody, transforming them into a series of abstract photographic images.
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Join us for an opening reception celebrating the 2016 Adirondacks National Exhibition of American Watercolors and solo exhibitions by Carl Rubino and Ruth Clegg on Friday August 5, from 5-7pm.
