DEPTH OF FIELD/PHOTO-BASED WORK
Photography had played an insignificant role in my art until very recent years. Of course I've always used photos as source material, sometimes even projecting an image and painting directly from it. But with the Depth of Field series the photographic image as photograph became an integral part of the spatial organization of the picture. Now I had at my command a particular kind of illusion possible only with the camera. I wasn't especially concerned with the quality of the photograph: it was one element among many and would be reconditioned by what overlaid it, interrupted it, or altered it. Flat shapes, veils, surrounds, digital manipulations, painterly backdrops, letters, partitioning -- all these things forced the photographic sections to adhere to an overall abstract structure that often questioned the continuity of photographic illusion itself. In the Depth of Field pieces, the photo image is on occasion blurred, sometimes to the point of illegibility. The excitement came from the spatial play between overt frontal planes and an illusion of depth that is straining to make itself felt.
In those works that retain the full force of photographic image -- the large assembled print Mel Invades China, for instance (see below) -- a formal conflict comes about by incongruous settings that don't support a complete representational illusion. You have what I call the Klimt Effect: fully modeled form embedded in an overall flattened pictorial environment. Recently I have been sectioning off photo images, giving them their own little bit of real estate, so that I might treat the surrounding spaces more freely as fields for various kinds of painterly, graphic or collage activity.
In those works that retain the full force of photographic image -- the large assembled print Mel Invades China, for instance (see below) -- a formal conflict comes about by incongruous settings that don't support a complete representational illusion. You have what I call the Klimt Effect: fully modeled form embedded in an overall flattened pictorial environment. Recently I have been sectioning off photo images, giving them their own little bit of real estate, so that I might treat the surrounding spaces more freely as fields for various kinds of painterly, graphic or collage activity.
Mike With Punching Bag, photograph, archival pigment print, 2018
I Was A Highway Hussy, archival pigment print, 2014
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Lillian As Studio Mermaid, archival pigment print, 2014
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Mel With Wood grain, archival pigment print, 2014
Melanie Invades China, archival pigment print with acrylic and collage on sectioned pieces of paper, 2014