Reaching Peak….

I’ve been preparing for 3 shows, a gallery exhibit and a fund-raiser, all starting next week. But to my surprise, fall in Bucks County, PA has turned quite beautiful. I felt a walk was in order to take it all in. So I packed a bag, not with a change of cloth and toothbrush, but with a camera, a few lenses and a couple Cliff Bars. Arriving in the dark at a favorite haunt, I watched the moon set over a distant ridge and spoke with a bird watcher about how great the hawk migration has been this year. In time I could see the vibrance of maple, oak, and sycamore leaves as the sun lit them from behind.

To the trails I went and began to work. It was very affecting. I responded quickly to the dramatic light, vivid reds, yellows and oranges, but also to the geometry I could create by purposeful composition and perspective. Wide angle thru short telephoto focal lengths allowed me to make images that conveyed the grandeur of an otherwise ordinary fall day. Five hours later, I was pretty spent, but was pretty pleased I made it out.

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Abstract? It’s all abstract……

I always have some work in my booth that leans more to the abstract side of the realism-abstract continuum. Fundamentally, I think abstraction is no different in photography than in other two-dimensional mediums. With photography, most certainly with mine, there is often a real subject matter being portrayed. This may keep my abstract work from being as abstract as some paintings, but certainly it’s in that camp.

Ultimately, all art is an abstraction of reality. I, using photography, am working with a two-dimensional, static medium and yet hope to elicit an emotional response in my viewers based on a real experience or feeling that I want to convey. Photography, maybe more than any other medium, is seen as dealing with reality. It’s a paradox though because I am abstracting so much of the “reality” I experienced. Consider too that I may be using the subject in front of me to convey an idea or an emotion that has little to do with the literal visual stimulus I experienced in the field. That is, I have visualized a finished print of an image that is based on the scene in front of me but not trying to recreate (as closely as the medium allows), what the viewer would see were they with me.

As a culture, we know how to “read” photographs and paintings so that they make sense to us. Enough so that  may serve as a substitute for having experienced the event or scene first hand, even eliciting a similar emotion. It is up to the artist to decide by what means, and to what extent, to use their medium to convey a particular message. It’s tricky business.

Whether the work is that of Ansel Adams, who ultimately determined photography should be a faithful reproduction of reality (f64 group), or painters working in the style of trompe l’oeil, a greater or lesser degree of abstraction is still in effect. The very act of isolating a section of a visual experience and reproducing it in a two-dimensional form on some substrate, is in itself abstraction. While the artist using pure shape, color, and form in a non-mimetic way, may more quickly be recognized as creating abstract works, every artist is conscious of the effects those elements play in visual expression.

(c) 2010 Paul Grecian - Is this abstract?

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