Tag: change

  • Off-Hand

    Off-Hand

    Convergent series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, brown, muted, smear, cars, streaks, shape
    Hot Haze, 2015 – Convergent :: (click to see more)

    The things I do today in an off-hand casual way are not necessarily new things – but they certainly are much easier to achieve. It wasn’t so long ago that I sweated … or froze, in my basement darkroom trying to cull forth the image in my mind’s eye – not always with full success. And now in moments I can fully realize my imaginings – yet they still require forethought and insight to make them in the first place.

    Every now and again I remember a digital lab I saw years ago in the east end of Toronto that had several Sun digital imaging workstations that must have cost hundreds of thousands each at the time – doing the kinds of things I do on my laptop in seconds.

    The path to success in some parallel dimensions has shortened but in the rest still requires the same fortitude. Some things stay constant – just how we achieve them changes, other things change completely. Interesting times.

  • Flood Gates

    Flood Gates

    Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, mauve, turquoise, muted, streaks, waves, pattern
    Underwater Calm, 2014 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

    I believe I’ve already related anecdotes about people mistaking my images for paintings. I’ve wrestled with how to classify my work for years now and some time ago I put painterly photography in my email signature.

    The other day I had some interesting conversations about how photography is changing, particularly now that image manipulation tools are ubiquitous on smart phones and tablets. In 1994 when I first managed to get my hands on a mac with photoshop version 1 installed and took my first swipe at one of my digitized negatives, it was to massage and abstract the image. And that was it, I was hooked – completely. So much so, I resolved to place my head back in the jaws of the lion and get a decent paying contract job to save money for my dream computer rig – so I could scan and rework my photographs. Ironically the first image I chose to work on in photoshop, was about movement – a smeared image of a cyclist friend riding through the woods.

    Only 20 years ago, digital photography was incredibly expensive and mostly the domain of professional commercial photographers. This has changed rapidly since, plus the pace of change has increased rapidly to the point now, where anyone with a smart phone can access apps to adjust their images with increasingly finer control. Some time ago a friend of mine made an interesting observation about how photography changed when cameras moved from waist height range finders to eye height view finders. The photographs people made with view finders were much more personal and intimate.

    Our ready access to digital tools like photoshop is changing what we do with photography once again. We are combining mediums like painting, illustration and numerous other disciplines with photography in exciting and interesting ways producing amazing hybrids. This is happening in nearly every field, creative or otherwise, that has moved from analog to digital – music, film – you name it. Having the ability to mediate via some kind of computer, has opened the flood gates of imagination and possibility. Nothing will ever be the same again.

  • Importance Of My Mother

    Importance Of My Mother

    Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, tan, green, muted, squares, shapes, waves, pattern
    Sinew Hand Clear Water Green Tile, 2013 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

    Somehow I’ve managed to avoid facing the important creative connection I have with my mother. It’s a difficult topic for me. I’ve always sought my mother’s approval but for 17 years now I’ve had to proceed without it – a necessary step one way or another – I suppose… and an important form of growth.

    It was my mother who first pointed out the perfect composition of a portrait I’d made while in university of my friend Kim. I gave it to my mother as a gift – it now hangs in my living room. Up to that time I hadn’t considered what I was doing was particularly good or important. With that one gesture, she gave me purpose. I had only recently bought my own 35mm camera and was experimenting with black and white night exposures.

    There’s a cloudy space in my memory between that time in 1984 to 1993. I know I showed work to my mother during that time, seeking her approval and I made gifts for her. She liked the music I listened to so I made a box with photographs on the outside to house cassettes of music mixes with photographs for their covers.

    From when I left university in 1988 to 1993 I built darkrooms in each place I lived – twice in my parents basement in Guelph, my tiny bathroom in Hamilton – where my funky stable water temperature plumbing rig seriously flooded the place –  and the basements of the two apartments where I lived in Windsor. In 1993 as I was about to leave to travel for 4 months I decided to test out Fuji colour negative films. I’d heard they were bright and saturated particularly in the blues and greens unlike Kodak films – which excited me since the majority of my work was about landscapes – sky and trees. I never really went back to black and white and only briefly built one other darkroom after that

    Upon returning from traveling I made two colour prints taken from that trip for my mother and decided to edit the images into three hand bound books I made specially. This was the first time I intentionally grouped my work thematically and the first time I exhibited and sold work.

    1993 to 1998 was a period of intense change. The end of a 5 year relationship and beginning of my current one, my mother sick and dying with cancer, estrangement from my sister, I quit my stable job and career – oscillated between consulting and my art practice, switched from black and white to colour negative film to colour positive slide film to scanning film and printing digitally on paper and film, saved to purchase a computer, scanners, printers, tablet, film recorder and colour accurate monitor, taught myself Photoshop, photo editing, colour management and printing, all about the hardware and three unstable operating systems, moved to Toronto and stopped commuting almost daily between cities – Guelph, Hamilton, London, Windsor, Georgian Bay and Muskoka.

    All of this profoundly affected my photography and served to focus my direction. I struggled to express the emotion I was experiencing in my new tumultuous life, rooted for the first time in a large busy urban centre with little or no regular escape to the countryside, working with new modalities in photography, coping with the loss of my mother and the stress of switching careers. I began to explore the colour of the city. I managed to escape for periods of time to Hawaii and Europe where I continued in vane to explore the calm countryside – even experimenting with abstracting outside the frame. Ultimately it was the colour and texture of Toronto that was the answer and this was what I showed my mother while she lay dying in bed. In retrospect, this was the single most important defining moment between us.

    Aside from this brief list of encounters between my mother and I, I was – and am still – profoundly affected by her struggle as an artist. She worked to define herself during a time when as a woman she was expected to only be and even rejected as anything other than a housewife and mother of three children. Her expertise was colour and fabric. She was an amazing seamstress making most of her and our clothes and volunteering tirelessly in her community. Ironically I think she was finally finding her feet as an artist just as she got sick and would have had greater success in her work had she lived. I feel awful and ungrateful saying this, but my mother’s death and the consequent end of our relationship facilitated and sped my creative growth – I would be someone different today were she still alive.

    I have several beautiful examples of her fabric sculptures in my studio that daily remind me of her and us. There is great sadness and oddly, squeamish embarrassment in me as I write about my mother and my past history, but there is also great joy and hope, because I can see just how far I’ve come.