Artist's Statement

ARTIST'S STATEMENT Photography involves a radical re-framing of reality. Meaning is often as determined by what is excluded from the “framing” of an images as it is by those included elements that are revealed in detail. For instance, the artist has intentionally excluded human figures, although human presence is profoundly alluded to, principally through cultural remnants and artifacts. There is always an added dimension beyond the concrete reality presented; and metaphor, symbol, and allegory are the conduits of supplemental meaning. These images are not about landscape as a document of reality, but about landscape populated by a forest of symbols. Symbol, an image that stands for something more than it denotes literally, is like metaphor in that it transfers meaning from one thing to another. Symbolic images are often physical objects and symbolize abstract meaning. Some of the symbol/symbolic-meaning pairs here are: water/the unconscious; river/unceasing passage of time; islands/isolation, refuge; ruin/the past; light/knowledge, purity; and darkness/the hidden. The metaphorical references are repeated, contrasted, and amplified from image to image, giving them an allegorical or narrative structure. Metaphoric treatment of the sky and clouds ranges from storm/threat of violence to purity and spiritual transformation. The symbolic meaning of trees and flowing water can likewise be traced. The ruin is a prominent example of allegorical reference. It embodies the fragmentary, abandoned, and forgotten and stands for history as a process of decay, neglect, and loss. The ruin shown in series erects an allegorical nature/culture opposition. These images are meant to be archetypal, as presenting some profound concern embedded in the human mind. The image titles do not relate to geographical reality, but refer to an implied symbolic meaning. For example, Castle Kilchurn, on Loch Awe, in Scotland, is titled "Camelot," thus grafting an abstract meaning of loss and hope onto the scene. Allusion to myth, actual historic events (the Albigensian Crusades) and specific moments in time (morning, 16 March 1244) inject another overlay of possible symbolic meaning. The images in the polychrome portfolio of “The Fallen” are very different from color photographs made from color negatives. Color is not recorded in the camera negative, which is large format, black and white, but assigned later into the digital print without regard to the colors present at the time the camera negative was exposed. Image detail and color saturation are both expressively optimized by this dissolution of color in a skeleton of black and white tonal range. The Color Field painters (Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler) totally freed color from its bonds to nature by using pure color to describe abstract geometric forms. In the images here, color is also disconnected from nature, but it is re-applied to envelop a detailed landscape in emotion-charged tones. These polychrome images can be described as Expressionistic, in an allusion to the Expressionist painters and their treatment of color. This artistic impulse is characterized by the use of heightened symbolic colors to express emotional, psychic, and archetypal concerns, as stimulated by imagination. A seminal painting is Paul Serusier’s "Talisman," influenced by Paul Gauguin. Its pictorial strategy was to distort the colors of nature by using pure colors, unmixed with white, assembled in a certain order to create a transposition of perceived sensation. The Expressionists' enthusiasm for ecstatic color is revealed in Paul Gauguin’s "Vision After the Sermon." It is notable for its shimmery crimson hill, used as a symbolic background to the struggle between heaven and earth, or good and evil.