Enlightening Trip to the Museum

A few photography examples really inspired me while at the Spencer Art Museum.  

I felt the repetitive imagery of Jeff Brouws' Twelve Drive-Ins very effective.

The images that attempted to find locations of other images from decades before were also quite effective. Such as Andrew Joseph Russel's Hanging Rock, foot of Echo Canyon and Rick Dingus' similarly named photo.  The contrast between monochrome images and color was also very striking and I was inspired to incorporate it into my own project.

And while somewhat on topic, I've been attempting to edit some aspects of an earlier photo from this year.  I feel that by reducing the glare of the sun and over saturating the red of the image really makes the photo beautiful.

Editing in Photoshop

While playing around in photoshop I ended up with this image.  I rather enjoy the way the sharp points meet with soft curves and how the colors seem to shatter.

Susan Sontag - On Photography Excerpt

As someone who closely identifies with the concept of Plato's cave, Sontag immediately earned my attention with the opening of this excerpt of "On Photography." However I feel the point of the excerpt is incredibly hindered by the failure to explain the point of Plato's cave.  The cave is a metaphor for where most of humanity hides, and while the masses hide in the cave certain information is given to those in the cave.

The cave attempts to show that the masses are blind to a greater perspective because they are "in" the cave.

Sontag then attempts to argue that the photograph can be used to widen the perspective of the "cave." Images of events, people, or animals allowed a greater scope of the world that paintings failed to grasp, Sontag argues.

In some ways I do agree with her.  Because photos do take a less structured image than a painting they are a truer image of the world.  Without an artist's eye deciding what is or isn't important, the photograph becomes a "truer" representation of the physical world.

However, with the rampant use of photoshop and photo editing this photographic integrity is disappearing.  By editing photos, in anyway at all, is the exact pitfall of Plato's cave.  Photos, when edited, pervert their perspective.  People believe in the honest reflection of photography, but when the images are twisted and beautified they become as unrealistic as any painting.  If photography aims to bring humanity out of Plato's cave then photography seems to be going extinct.

Car Photo Collage Images

Using the free time given last week, I took the opportunity to take photos for the time/space project.  I took nearly 500 photos on the road. These are just a few images that interest me personally.

Landscape Painting

Older posts of mine show a work in progress painting that I'm working on.  I spent some of the last week working on it and I think the progress is worth showing. The left aligned image is the same image as the latest photo I had posted so far.  Enjoy.

Shortly after finishing my latest additions on the painting I learned that my mother's cancer has started coming back.   Because this painting is for her specifically I need to get this finished.

New Project, Photo Collage of Time & Space

So starting a new assignment, create a photo collage that shows a relationship between time and, or space changes.  I have a few ideas that I'm working on, one of them being a tree's perspective of time.

More or less the collage will be the shape of a tree throughout the time of the photos I take.  Not photos of a tree, but photos from where the tree sits.  After taking a few photos of the concept and playing with them in photoshop, I started playing around with various filters and style editors.

This image is a playful example of one of the more interesting filters.  The simplicity of the elements in the photo is particularly captivating to me, but I think it might be too stylized for the project's scope.

Life Drawing Class

During the semester I have been taking my first life drawing class.  On the very first day the teacher recognized that I have some structural issues with my drawings.  After that first day I've been working incredibly hard to pay more attention to the lines I draw and their relationships to the lines around them.  These two drawings are the best realized efforts from the class so far.

 I feel that these two drawings are a good reflection on my new focus on line importance.  One of my common drawing traits is to sketch a line many repetitive times, letting the line eventually make its way into the drawing.  It is a major challenge for me to identify the start and the end for a line without many little lines in between.  

I believe this focus on preciseness, this focus on making every little part count, is an aspect of style I was sorely lacking.

A Few Thoughts On The Vessel Project

Though the project was incredibly enjoyable on a personal level I felt that the time constraint was too much.  I understand that there is no way to really add time to the project  with so many other projects that need to finished.  Due to the fact that so many of the tools are under strict observation, as they should be, but are only open during the day when students should be in class.  I'm sure I am not the only person who skipped a class so that I could work on the project because of the somewhat limited access to the tools and the time restraint for completing the project.

That said, I am really happy with the way my particular project turned out.  The interaction between the cherry and ash woods is quite beautiful.  My only regret is how closely the ash resembled the object that it was supposed to display.