Salidasmith

  What influences the shape of a photographic composition? From behind the lens of most cameras, your view of the world falls typically within a rectangular form, either vertical or horizontal.   Cameras may artificially allow you to adjust the field of view so as to more easily visualize a square or panoramic canvas, but in any event, the camera itself influences how you visually perceive the world.   In the end, it will often dictate the two-dimensional shape of your final work.   If you consider how you actually see, it is obvious that there no straight lines whatsoever at the edge of your vision.   We are wonderfully adept at defocusing and perceiving a cone of light, emphasizing the horizontal, in an arc of about 120 degrees.   And we instantly focus on detail, drawing our perceptual attention like a telephoto lens to movement, color and forms that have alerted us.     Are there other influences which give shape to...

 Winter is closing in and I can't resist looking at garden photos taken when the richness of plant life and sunlight washed over us daily.  I was suffering the absence of family and friends, the horror of the pandemic, and endless ignorance from leadership; but was lucky to have an abundance of beauty nearby.   At 7,000 feet summer temperatures vacillate between forty and ninety degrees, often in the same 24 hour period.  During the peak of the day, leaf temperatures breech 150 degrees and no amount of water, which is scarce here, can heal the torment of the plants.  Shade from other plants, healthy layering of the landscape and ultimately, some shade cloth for the most delicate species is a requirement.  But looking back, it was worth it. Today, swirls of thin snow accumulate outside the door and Salida has assumed its late fall wardrobe colors of brown and pale straw.   I will return to garden images again this winter.  ... a good time...

  Posted this to behance today: In first light the clouds boil across the Sangres driven by distant winds high and cold. It is almost too beautiful. I turn my back, make coffee, thinking it will happen again, tomorrow.

“I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings,” he says. “Because style is violent, and I am not violent."  A quote from Gerhard Richter. Richter painted powerful photo-realistic images for years before turning more intensively to abstraction.  I watched a movie several years ago which showed Gerhard preparing large abstractions for an upcoming exhibit.  I believe the movie was titled "Gerhard Richter Painting" and is available through Amazon.  I watched in fascination as he pulled entire lines of color across an existing field of colors, allowing the underlying areas to show through in some places, obscuring it in others.  I was excited by what I saw because it closely resembled work I was doing in Photoshop, generally with images from nature. I returned to my work and began interpreting Richter's approach in Photoshop; selecting a swath of the image notable for its colors or form, copying, then pasting, then...

  Passion is infused into art along two paths.   It is no different than in life.   There is the gentle persuasion of material and the easing together of elements.   Creating relationships with kindness, persuasion, solicitation of sensitivities.   There are also the techniques of power,   where the large muscles of the mind and body move material, embrace an idea in an intense lock that can only be released through some mutual consummation experienced between the artist and the work.   The gentle approach and the powerful approach.   They are equally important.   These two aspects of interaction are exactly yin and yang.   They should not be confused with male and female.   They are the tools of an artist who is an animal capable of imagination and creativity.   Miyamoto Musashi (circa 1600, Japan) might have said, “You must study this and understand it to achieve your potential.”     All el...

  I walked under blue skies and through a skiff of snow today.   The trail up S Mountain didn’t offer anything to my camera that was structurally interesting.   A few lazy shots of lichen or a frost pattern, but nothing which grabbed at me.   Later, examining images taken over the holiday, I found little inspiring, yet could not escape the feeling that the landscape, the brisk air, leaves drying and partially covered by snow, and the brilliant Colorado sky had filled me with pleasure that should find some expression.   I began experimenting with an image of tree stump      among a few leaves.   The roots had character.   There were suggestions of color.   As I turned the image, applying different filters, then reblending the layers, I saw what had been hidden.   It was the colors … the colors of fall slowly disappearing as winter became ascendant.