Friday, November 15

Summer + Winter - Fall


It's cold outside. 

Summer's green went memory last week and now? Winter stalks don't know they're dead when only last week sun made air green. Summer's a memory, even in summer. But winter's real... hard as a grant tablet. Even in summer, winter's hard. 

Y'know?

GEEK STUFF: That stalk shivered in front of my Canon 7D MkII. It was the day before night flash froze it. And this technique is new to me. I've rendered the image almost entirely with brushes in PSCC in an attempt to place each feeling. 

Flower pictures are hard to understand. It's so hard for an artist to deal with their form, color, line, texture... So hard to let them say anything more than the immensity of what they come to us with. Only the greatest artists can speak through flowers... can find in them a metaphorical doorway to something else. Not something more necessarily, but something other than what they scream into our brains through our eyes. 

Flowers are loud. Thoughts and feelings are subtle. It's easier to change a blinding klieg light than it is to change, bend, influence... the meaning of a flower. Flowers mute the artist.

You ever done a picture-perfect image of a flower? Shown it to someone? Hear them murmur, "How pretty. You are a good photographer." And if you've rendered it in all of its beauty, well you are a good photographer. But if all that an audience sees and feels is flower... You are not an artist. 

Art without wonder is merely craft. Flowers prove that more forcefully than any other subject except... except for babies, dogs, and Hustler centerfolds. 

No comments: