Even though I’m still not positive what will result from all of the vintage photos I’ve been collecting lately, I’m actually starting to see something take form. I’ve been taking a break from the physical creation of my personal artwork lately but this hasn’t meant that I haven’t been… percolating…
At this point it’s clear that I have two very different – yet oddly parallel – bodies of work evolving in my mind. One which builds on “spirits within” theme of images/sketches of females with wrappings around their heads and another that is presently manifesting as a result of the photos I’ve found. Both series of work deal with death, ghosts, consciousness, and – as is the case with all my work – an ever shifting perception of identity.
Now that the semester is off to a start I’m starting to catch a glimpse of some sort of routine or schedule and it’s causing an itch to form beneath my skin for which only getting back into the studio can relieve. And, in reality, my students are much more to thank than anything else. Teaching provides something special to my artistic practice that I can’t attain anywhere else – a kind of energy and passion that I think could be easily lost in the pace of life otherwise.
This weekend I’ve been focusing on rest more than anything. I believed I would find myself in the studio today but here it is Saturday evening and my time has been allocated for other things over the next 48 hours. So, as a compromise I’ve decided to share some of the recent photographic discoveries. This has been productive in that I have spent some necessary time with these images – time that is essential to develop some of the tendrils of prospective ideas that have been insinuating themselves into my consciousness as of late.
Out of the 22 new photos I’ve added in the past month, here are my 5 favorites:
Cry The Bird 
I wonder if photography is the only art that benefits by mistakes. It would be hard to come up with a more poignant picture than the boy in front of the tree. The shadows of the adults lean in, conjoined like huge paper angels, and the child slightly turns away and shuts his eyes at the crucial moment. Everything is kind of staggering sideways, but you look straightaway at the boy’s face. He looks like a little captive–in the way that every subject is a kind of captive. I’ll miss those long shadows in pictures, now that you can instantly delete all imperfections.
Nice observations. I personally believe that ALL art benefits from mistakes but then, I’m also a bit of a perfectionist so color me “walking contradiction”. I suppose that, for me personally, nature is imperfect – reality is imperfect – therefor the moments that capture something as it is, without exceeding illusion (because there is always some) is in itself… perfect…