While black and white fine art photography is an amazing, wonderful creative outlet that is very difficult to adequately describe in words, for the last two or three years I've been thinking obsessively about something else: getting back in to painting.
Last August, when I spent a week mostly alone camping in the Sierra Nevada mountains on what turned out to be a incredibly productive photographic outing, I had almost left the camera at home. I had an elaborate plan to stock up on paints and canvas, and spend the trip getting back in touch with painting as a form of artistic expression. But that never happened. Why? Fear of the unknown? Too easy to just take the camera and stay in the comfort zone? That may be part of it. But also, consider the only kind of painting I'm interested in: abstracts. While camping in the High Sierra wilderness would be the perfect setting for someone painting watercolors of beautiful mountain meadows and crystal-clear alpine lakes, it didn't seem like the ideal inspiration for unleashing the dark abstractions that have been lurking deep in the hidden recesses of my mind for the last 20 years.
In January, I visited the studio/gallery of a local Pomona artist, Bill Moore or "Father Bill". His work simultaneously excited me and depressed me. Excited me because it was the closest thing I had seen to the visions haunting my brain. Depressed me not just because he was so good and I would have a long struggle to get even close to his skill level, but because now I worried if attempts to put my visions on canvas would be at all original. If you're curious, Father Bill doesn't have a web site but you can see a few examples of his work here.
For the last three months, I've been spending a lot of time making sketches, the purpose of which is to crystallize some of my ideas before I start painting them. My wife has been very encouraging, but I've been putting off getting this started. Partly because there are too many things going on in my life right now, and partly because the time didn't quite feel right.
I'm glad I waited. Because on Friday afternoon, while sitting at Gallery 57 Underground, the dream of abstract paintings and the reality of fine art photography collided in a small big bang. I took a small skull (probably a bobcat) I had found out in a remote area of the desert a few years ago, and was using the textured concrete floor as a backdrop. Then I remembered a dark patch of floor in the back of the gallery where a reddish tint from some old paint was visible on the concrete--a situation where a black and white image doesn't capture the beauty of the situation. So on a whim, I switched my camera from black and white mode to color mode and started shooting. A few hours later, I had quite a few color images and left the gallery.
Yesterday evening I sat down at the computer and started working on the images in Photoshop. And a wonderful thing happened. The abstract visions bouncing through my mind for many years suddenly found an outlet--not through painting, but through the familiar act of photography. But this was very different from my existing body of work in one respect: it was color.
This is an exciting new direction for me, but it doesn't actually change much. I'm not suddenly going to start photographing landscapes in color. Color photography for me is an outlet for my abstract visions--and right now it's just confined to the Tales from the Underground series. I look forward to producing more color photographs that look like abstract paintings, and showing a mixture of both black and white and color images at my Tales from the Underground show in January 2006.
[ photograph above: Pomona, 2005 ]
