Painting With A Camera: Flowers - Series 1
The series is an exploration of dialogues. Pictorially it creates a dialogue between representational and non-representational (figurative and abstract) art. It expands the conversation that has ensued for over a century between painting and photography. Conceptually it explores the dialogue between a formulated approach and chance opportunity. Because the series realizes these dialogues, these polarities of opposition, it, therefore, embodies their inherent contradictions. These contradictions, in part, are manifest in the process of creating each image. If you remove the notion that to create a painting, one must use paint (much the way Gerhard Richter insisted of his early photorealistic paintings that if you remove the notion that you need a camera to produce photographs, then his paintings are photographs), then these images are paintings. One of the most intriguing qualities of my art is the marriage of chance opportunity and formulaic systems. With the flower series, there is a system for creating the images. It is formulaic and repetitive. However, despite this system, there is no way to know how the final art will turn out, even when looking at the screen of my phone. The system, it would seem, is used to allow chance opportunity to manifest. What follows are a few examples from a much, much larger project.
