Unnamed Seventeen, 2017 — Sidelong :: (click to see more)
It’s been really difficult for me to articulate thoughtfully about the images I make. I realize now it’s because I largely operate intuitively. Much of what I do and everything I pursue is all based on intuition. I do it because it feels like the right thing to do. I decide on images based on how they feel to me.
This is likely why editing a body of work is so difficult for me. I have a strong emotional attachment to everything I’ve made and have trouble releasing it when it doesn’t sufficiently communicate my goal.
I accidentally stumbled upon a method that seems to work for editing a body of work. I leave the images alone for several months – so I kind of forget about them, distance myself and lose some emotional attachment. Then I can be dispassionate in my evaluation.
Satin Refraction, 2014 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)
There is a dynamic balance in a city – one that’s in constant flux. From one day or season to the next the geometry is changing – coupled with the constant movement of objects within and you have an ever changing panoply of material to experience
These images ponder the shape of the city and how best to portray it. Not just the geometry of the space but the passage through it – a combination of the shape and the experience of it. The emotion of interacting and living within it.
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.
Undulating Green Smoke, 2013 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)
I just read about a body of work Alfred Stieglitz made of clouds he titled Equivalents. For him, they were equivalent to music. I’d never heard of this work of his before but it immediately felt right. The premise that you can make photographs that represent something as ephemeral as music or emotion is at the core of what I do – finding a way to articulate the emotional state of urban living.
As I’ve said in the past, my interest lies in the instant when waves of movement coincide – intersecting actions that reinforce and multiply each other. Music is an important enabler when photographing and finding these moments. Music was essential for me as I photographed for Coloured City and music is absolutely essential as I edit and finish images. Music allows me to see into an image I’m working on – connect with it on a fundamental level so I perceive what it can become as I methodically expose it’s potential – it puts me into the right mind state.
Anywhere there are large numbers of people living, there is an accelerated pace – an increased potential. The greater the urban density the greater the pressure of possibility – not too dissimilar to compressing gas into a liquid – the pace of action is elevated and with it the coincident intersections.
This is when it gets interesting – when it gets fun.
Deconstructed Pink Orange, 2012 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)
I can’t help feeling odd lately. I find myself with a small amount of time on my hands – enough to get down to creative work but I feel the work isn’t worth doing. I’ve been in production mode in my print business working to deadlines and tasks for a long time now and I’m suddenly at loose ends. I like to have a goal – a purpose. But just finishing images – any image, I feel has no apparent purpose except self satisfaction and oddly I don’t find it satisfying… not right now.
I’m staring at the light of my monitor reflecting off the scaly wrinkly skin on the back of my left hand and realizing with new shock that I’m getting old…er – and that my time is very likely limited. There’s no time for fooling around – or rather less time than there was previously. So why am I feeling unmotivated?
All of this is calling into question deep ideals in my life – concerns centered around purpose and meaning. Is it important or purposeful for me to make images? I don’t have a satisfying answer to that. And what is the meaning of what I’m exploring? I don’t have a solid answer to that either.
With the meaning of my explorations, I do think I stepped away from realism and figurative work because I wanted to incorporate emotion and sensation into my images and I felt a conventional realistic landscape approach wasn’t emotive enough – failed to sufficiently capture the dynamic of urban life – that, plus a still image is usually a single moment in time. I needed to find an alternative that stretched beyond those still image/single moment bounds yet somehow managed to portray movement and activity. I’m still exploring these concerns.
I later also considered a slightly different approach for Coloured City and instead distilled the view to essential shapes and colours rather than movement. But overall, I was still concerned with the dynamism, the emotion and the activity of urban life.
I don’t know, I guess I’ll just have to trust in my prime directive and keep slogging away in the hopes that I rebound out of this funk.
Orange Overriding Mauve, 2012 – Light Signatures :: (Click to see more)
I’m entering into another phase of my – well dare I say, plan? More a loose collection of ideas, ideals and intents than a coherent plan. All the same I’m entering into a new segment of it. On one hand, I’m excited, or more simply, I’m thinking – oh at long last, on the other hand I’m kind of tired of thinking about it for so long and not so jazzed. The excitement and anticipation come in waves interleaved with apprehension and corresponding fear.
It’s somewhat unknown territory for me but stuff I’ve had a good long time to get to know in a kind of conceptual way in my imagination at least so its not completely unknown. And of course part of why it’s taken so long to get to this phase is my intense discomfort with this stage. A lot of the lead up has been practice, working out concepts and just plain getting myself as familiar with the ideas as possible without actually executing. Kind of like a lot mental dry runs.
My fear and apprehension is completely irrational I know, but the intellectual understanding of my irrationality doesn’t diminish the gravity of my emotion – unfortunately. So I’ve had to find other ways to gradually pry my fingers off the ladder rung I’m on, in preparation for the leap of faith into the great void of the unknown – part of which has been to familiarize myself so the void is not so unknown. Does this mean I don’t have faith in myself? Hmm.
In many ways I find it easier to do things when I don’t know so much – which is how I got started when I seriously committed to following my photography practice as a career. If I had known as much as I do now or known as much about the obstacles and pitfalls, I wouldn’t have had the guts to make the leap. I would have buckled. I’m not sure why the unknown nature of the void has been such a unusual stumbling block for me this time, especially considering unknown is usually easier for me.
Perhaps its to do with high expectation – unreasonable expectation? More likely its because my vulnerable feelings are at stake. I don’t like getting hurt. I don’t know, and I kind of don’t care at this stage – or so I tell myself constantly in the hope of lulling my fears. I’ve kind of beaten the whole thing until its a dead horse so I might as well give up thinking about it so much and just stumble on through.
