Art and Beauty

Art is war. I'm pretty sure any artist could tell you that. The career path of an artist is rarely clearly marked, and often, we must forge our own. It's a balancing act of the day job, responsibilities, commitments, and personal health. I find that I become most stressed when I am unable to determine what the priority is. Everything can seem equally important, but everything cannot always be done. My work at Gallery 6 looks good. It's a creative space, and I enjoyed seeing the display. The show was well selected, with a nice variety and consistency.

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The show was titled Discovering Beauty, and it provoked me to think about the idea of beauty more thoroughly. It has always been an important aspect of my work and I appreciated the opportunity to farther explore the topic. I focused on these ideas in relevance to the work on display:

Explorations of Time and Space

In a single moment, we register images, smells, sounds and words, and link it to our past, present and future. Reality is layered. Beauty exist in the overlap. The world is seen through many eyes, and thousands of realities exist in a single space. My work expresses the layers of reality, and the duality of perception and the truth. It is a journey through these layers, and exploration of what is seen and what is felt. Photographs capture an instant, and layers of photographs read as a film strip, showing how time passes. Painting and distortion reflect on the deception of what we see. I embrace imperfections of my varying processes to emphasize the beauty of what we cannot predict.

All things perceived are temporal, only lasting a moment, vanishing with the light. The spirit endures beyond the dusk of the flesh. Repetition of sunsets reiterates the series of days. Life is made up of moments that cannot always be seen all at once. Our bodies are as a ticking clock, with an ever nearing end, yet the decay of mortality is beautiful. Birds and flight are represented in my work as a means to escape from the traps on routine. Our spirits can fly beyond what we can see. Discovering the freedom is the most beautiful part of life, allowing us to move between the layers.

Images for Thought and Time

I went camping recently, and stumbled upon this interesting little store called Abacus. It was a nice, funky collection of things for the home, jewelry, art, etc. It was rather exciting. Seeing original ideas is always inspiring. It gets me excited to get back here into the studio to work on my own creations. I thought I'd share some of the current things I've been looking at lately. From the Abacus gallery, I saw these amazing, intricate clocks by Roger Wood. He assembled a large assortment of antique items including clock faces, and, in the ones I saw, had them under a glass dome. The result was like a time terrarium. I've been working on some images that deal with time as well, so it was interesting to see this interpretation. Also at Abacus was a photographer Scott Matyjaszek. The work on display of his were 3D "photo sculptures." I've seen several attempts at this, but his were some on the most convincing ones I'v ever seen. The cutting was exceptionally precise, and there were a significant amount of layers. I think when I've seen other attempts, there is only two or three layers, which doesn't give the image enough complexity to be convincing. Today, I saw a post by the Vermont Center for Photography for an artist, Sally Apfelbaum, who is currently on display in  their gallery. I was quite interested in her multiple exposures. Visually, they are intricate and complex. It also deals with time again, as well as perspective. In my work, I usually layer several images because I am trying to emphasize the figment of reality. In one of Apfelbaum's images, she took pictures of the same structure from north, south, east, and west. It's an intriguing idea to me, to explore multiple views in a single image. To me, it seems to say that the true image of the structure exists in the entirety of the object, informing the viewer of all sides. These images read almost like memories, and the way our mind will layer information from experiences. The segments reveal the whole.