Seeing the light: making abstract paintings using a camera
Letting art is the paradox of active surrender. I have to work for art if I want art to work on me.
— Jeanette Winterson, from “Art Objects”
Do you ever wake up with an image in your mind and wonder, “where did that image come from” and then realize it’s the wall you ride by every time you ride by that wall on your way doing daily life stuff but there’s a nagging feeling that there’s something else you saw in that wall and so you wonder, “why is this image important?”
And then eventually you find yourself writing a manifesto on how to create that image in your imagination so that it’s pure energy, like the idea of the infinite, and you write down a set of constraints to accomplish how Picasso once described art in that interview a few years ago, “art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”
I think Michaelangelo wrote or said something similar and I’m not aligning my experiments to make abstract paintings using a camera and a piece of posterboard that I cut holes with the importance of these artists, but I did come up with a manifesto of sorts so that when I see a space or a landscape or a wall that I see through, not like x-rays, but like John Zorn’s music or Mark Rothko’s paintings created portal to the Infinite as a way to come closer into it, that I grab my camera and poster board and a couple of tripods and some other gear that feels like too much when riding to a trailhead to hike around the foothills but then the sun crests toward the East where our energy comes from and is maybe the source of inspiration for this goal to create an image like an abstract painting using my imagination and technical knowledge of the camera and without manipulating the actual light or landscapes, but to use these, abstractly, to supply simple colors and shapes in the search of the infinite.
OBVS I’m still working on how to express this so thanks for listening/reading today and I’d love for you to see the first three of these photopaintings, along with some very cool and quite accomplished actual artworks from other very cool and accomplished artists who we’ve all been part of the “Show and Tell” artist residency program which was imagined and is supported by the Alexa Rose Foundation and The Common Well who are putting on the “Meet Me at the Well” event with ways to interact with art, artists and other cool people of the planet all day (10am-8pm) on Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024, at The Common Well (110 W 31st Street, Garden City, ID).
10am - 8pm: The Clothesline Art Sale — everything $5-50 so a great place to pick up some actual artworks made by actual people who make artworks.
Unveiling of the outside mural created during the first Mural School this summer
4pm: Panel discussion with residency artists: Creative Synergy in an Interdisciplinary Art Community
5pm: Panel discussion with residency artists: Showing Up & Making Space for Art
6pm: toasts to the “Show and Tell” residency artists
Live music on the backyard stage!
That should be super fun and on Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 12 and 13, 2024, 10am-6pm, drop by Sunset Grove (our place in Boise) as part of the Boise Open Studio Tour and check out other photopaintings, some landscape and street photography and some Oliver Bicycle Works artworks.
I’ve been so busy and have experienced so many super cool things recently, and these things too inspired me recently:
Amber of Memory (On Amazon music) — album by Tommy Guerrero — yep, the dude from the Bones Brigade — super chill jazzy surf rock with an L.A. sound.
Bikes — a short film (4:57) about bicycles, “not lightweight bikes, not expensive bikes — just bikes.” Super cool video on the love of bikes and how some “bikes have us.”
OMG! — started in 1917! and maybe in a letter to Winston Churchill!!
LOL — We remember of course that the Internet has been around since the 1960’s and that the Web really started with the first browser in 1993…so how long has “LOL” been around?
Hey lovely people, I hope you’re enjoying your ride. Would love to see you out there.
