If you know me at all, you know that I love modernism, particularly Abstract Expressionism. The preconceptions that photography was a mere mechanic process void of artistic merit was left behind in the previous century as fine art photographers were operating under the same artistic goals as painters by the 1910s. Even though most photographs are taken by pointing the lens out to capture the real world, artists like Stieglitz, Kertesz, Strand, and White through their use of exposure, camera angle, and distance to the subject, render the literal subject matter unrecognizable and irrelevant.
As a photographer, I have always been envious of those that can draw. I can't - well at least not well. Although I can create the elements of abstraction with the photographic process. I can't recreate what modernist refers to as the diaristic gesture or mark that was uniquely displayed in the work of artists like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and later Cy Twombly. Pollock moved the canvas off the easel and poured and dripped paint on it. Franz Kline grabbed a large house painting brush and made large sweeping strokes of black against the pristine white canvas. And Cy Twombly (my favorite of the three) obsessively repeated non sensical but visually familiar marks. I can't make a physical mark with a camera. I can compose like a painter: line, shape, repetition, tonality, even texture its all the same. But as a photographer I can never replicate a brush stroke.
Today, I decided to clean out the marker bin and test each pen for continual usefulness. Turns out that may be I am over thinking abstraction -- kind of a psychedelic Twombly, no?
Cy Twombly
There you go. I am the same way, I constantly overthink my artwork and have become very technical about certian things (which I hate). So in order to break myself of this habit, I have recentently reverted back to painting with nothing but my hands and a couple of sculpting knives that I picked up somewhere. I've found that it's very freeing to just let yourself go and get lost in the process for hours at a time.
ReplyDeleteAnyway enough of my rambling on and on about me, lol. Your doing a great job on your blog and this is yet another great article. Kudos, Windo. :)