… I was creating Correspondences: Line. Some visitors to my studio have told me they enjoy hearing where some of my ideas come from and how I put them together. So here is a short bit about the image sources I’ve used in this piece. This series came about because I was finding that the photos I was capturing with my camera were not interesting enough to me to print. They are fine photos but they weren’t really doing for me what I wanted my art to do. I was capturing these images because there was a particular thing I liked about what I was seeing but the whole photo was not as interesting to me as this one bit. In this case, with Line, I had a bunch of images I had captured in which there was a line that I really like. So I decided to take a collection of lines and make a new composite image from them. When I harvested the lines I may have stretched or squished them, depending on what I needed for the final composition. Here is the final image:
So some of the lines are obvious: from left to right–the gingko leaf, the maple seed helicopter, the sycamore leaf. But let’s go back to the left again, to the thin black line. See if you can find it in this source photo I shot in Italy:
Do you see the shadow on the overhanging roof tiles? I traced my line from this photo.
Okay, proceeding to the right you can see a picture of stucco with a shadow on it–look at the left edge of that portion of stucco and now look at this photo I took of the Sandia mountains in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I grew up:
I used the horizon of the mountains to crop the edge of the stucco.
Going right some more, there is the marvelous line of the shadow of a wire I captured in Italy:
Next there is the edge of an old piece of corrugated steel that I fell in love with. Look at that line dance:
I found that our eyes want to see a landscape when we see lines horizontally, so I rotated my lines to be vertical to pull them toward abstraction.
Lastly there is the yellow calligraphic line which comes from the shadow in a photo I made at Pompeii:
This series was a breakthrough for me because I started on the path toward taking apart and putting back together photographic images based on different characteristics: material; form; pattern; organization…
Very cool. I went to a training on teaching art to kids, and one of their units was Line, with all sorts of art activities focusing the kids just on different lines. This is the very grown-up and real version of that. It is interesting, and an insight into your artist’s brain that you would take a photo of a line you liked. It would never occur to me to dissect an image like that and try to capture one element.
cool–