I fell in love with the bones, the rafters, the beams and the sky in-between.
Life in Progress: Studio Construction
The Green Ladder | Variant Edition
I have been experimenting today with color. Lurid wild-child Aurora color, for an image that captured me as I was wandered the bleaker spaces of this territory last week. Hot midday sun, a lot of dirt, and the glory of green. Aurora, AKA Highway 99 is a riot of color theory once you get over bad taste, disregard, and what I used to think of as ugliness. Now it’s all just material, and life on the edge is looking good.
I am thinking of a new approach to digital printmaking. Instead of focusing on editions of 20 in which every print is identical, I am returning to the ancient analog idea of the “variant edition” in which the plate (the basic “file” or photo/image composite) is the same, but one makes subtle shifts to each print. The editions will be very small, perhaps 3 or 5. Here are some takes on the newest piece done in this mode. I am still proofing, so I am not sure yet what scale will suit these best.
Sources of Inspiration: Architectural Photographers Michael Burns & Kim Holtermand
Today I stumbled upon an essay in Arcade Magazine that will be a source of photographic inspiration for a long time. From photographer Michael Burns, “Desiring the Act…the Experience:”
“As a photographer, I seem to desire an awful lot. Or at least, I want to photograph an awful lot. I don’t desire the object of my intention but the very act of photographing. It’s been said that photographic depiction is a way of having a kind of proxy experience of reality, a way of hiding behind a safe, powerful and voyeuristic stance—making photographs in lieu of direct involvement in the real. But what if the act of photographing is the experience I’m after?
What am I really desiring in my photographic work? Do I really want to experience … to possess every rock in the desert I’m photographing? Every structure, vista, street theatre, woman or man, known or unknown to me? Maybe I want a little of that … maybe. But I certainly desire the photograph. Even more, I desire the act of photographing. The rush of the moment of split-second recognition, valuation and response embedded in an overarching awareness of thousands of photographs I and hundreds of others have made within the history of the medium; the differences between me and all those others who have made pictures before me and, all importantly, the tone of the image—that subtle and persuasive resonance with the instant, the light, framing, meaning and configuration. To sidestep the obvious, to see what others could not have prepared themselves to see, in that very particular way.”
Having read that, I think maybe I don’t have anything more ever to say about Why Take Pictures.
I called Michael up to ask if I could use an excerpt of the essay and an image or two and we had a great conversation. If you go to his website you will find perhaps the most minimalist and discreet presentation of a photographer’s work you have ever witnessed in this age of Lots of Stuff. [Read more…]
Beauty at the Edge: Highway 99 Revisited
I am living for awhile in temporary quarters between the Collision Center and the Aurora St. Vincent de Paul’s. My white box in the sky is surrounded by several hundred other white boxes neatly stacked and facing each other’s allotted squares of white venetian blinds. This is called an “apartment complex,” and after documenting the construction of dozens of such projects all over the city it is curious to actually live in one. I looked for several months for a place to stay while my house and studio are under renovation. All politics is personal, and all art is in some way political, in that creative obsessions inevitably run into the economic realities and constructs of power behind them.
For instance, take the economic fact that the smallest of those new boxes in the sky, the ones called “studios” start at $1,300 per month and go up as high as $2,800. [Read more…]
Banksy Was Not Here: The Buddha Deconstructed, with Help from Keats
I am thinking today about Banksy and about Keats. Why those two in one thought you might wonder, the romantic English poet and the bandanaed vandal? The answer lies in the idea of “negative capability,” first expressed by Keats in a letter about Shakespeare:
“… Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ (And elaborated later in another letter): “What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion Poet… A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity, he is continually filling some other body.’
I walk the waterfront in a cold spring rain, the water scuffed and gray, the Wheel paused mid turn and the roar of the viaduct behind me. The grind of traffic, the wind, the absent sun, the intense quiet within the noise. I look up, and there in the distance is the pale poet walking the daffodils and Lakes of England, and Banksy, spray painting a dark silhouette with a bright bouquet, or something darker with no flowers at all. A sly Rat, or a girl in windy skirt, holding the string of a balloon. Perhaps the beginning of a vine growing out of the sidewalk cracks. The poet disappears into symbol and reverie; the vandal tags walls with stenciled archetypes which look like “anybody could do it.” What Banksy has given us is a new appreciation of the wall as poet’s page writ large. We get to hold the irreconcilable opposites of fame and anonymity, of violation and communion, of alienation and mediation — offerings placed in front of the walker in the city, if we are prepared to see them.
I look back at the viaduct pillars and the empty parking lot. I look for the train tunnel, but it is gone, hidden behind a noise barrier put up for new condominiums. It is easy to become mesmerized by tracings in the concrete, the scribbles that seem like words but are not, the peeling banners, the errant sticker placed there for no reason other than that it was at hand height and the light was fading and someone had to move fast. I am distracted by a shifting memory of the afternoon when I last saw the tunnel, and the writing there spilling into the dark. Where is that photograph, taken with the Canon, was it 1998?
When I get home I find this among dozens of new pictures on my phone:
And then I walk out into my garden and look at my standard concrete garden Buddha and remember some other photos.
And then I paint some paintings for a day or so, thinking about rust and dirt and the city and the Seattle sky.
And look at a lot of graffiti and start moving things around on 44 layers in three different files:
Which is how the print above, “Banksy Was Not Here: Street Buddha Manifestation” manifested. (In answer to the person who asked me “Where is that wall?”)
This and ten other transfer prints in a series about the Alaska Way Viaduct are available at Zeitgeist for the Month of April.