Artist Statement
Artist Statement
My desire as an artist is to create fine photography prints.
I aim to deliver prints to the viewer, myself included, which have a certain beauty or attraction and evoke a mood or reflection. Prints that provide a feeling of tranquility or that may trigger a sense of nostalgia or, alternatively, uplift. I find black and white prints provide me with a pathway to express the nostalgia, while colour prints offer the alternative: something that is lighter or more uplifting. I therefore enjoy working with both formats.
My art work starts with camera capture of both the treasures that nature presents to us and man-made wonders. For me, the natural treasures include flora, landscapes, seascapes and wildlife, while the man-made wonders include aircraft, cars, boats and structures. I’m drawn to the natural having grown up on farms in New Zealand and to the man-made having pursued a career in engineering after graduation as a Civil Engineer and having engaged in flying as a hobby.
Art viewers understand that a painter has licence to paint on mediums of choice with tools and paints of choice to produce an image that is a perception of the vista lying before the painter or is in his/her mind’s eye.
Similarly, the fine art photographer has licence to use software tools available to produce prints that interpret the vista before him or her. The tools allow the photographer artist to collage, crop, rotate, merge, blur, sharpen, and brighten, to adjust tonal range and to tweak hue and saturation of images out of the camera in order to master the vision. The fine art photographer is not in any way bound or constrained to the truth or reality that some attribute to an image out of the camera. In fact, what the camera film or sensor records through the lens is already far from what the brain perceives through the human eye.
And so, the intermediate phase of my art work involves many hours of post capture manipulation to achieve a perception, a phase that is granted to the artist painter without question. I utilize various means, made possible by modern digital cameras and software including long exposure, focus stacking and high dynamic range techniques to bridge the gap between the camera image and my mind's perception rendered through my eyes.
The creation finishes with a selection of print paper substrate, weight, brightness, texture, surface finish, mounting and framing that best delivers the perception I am seeking.
My art work has been influenced by the work of Ansel Adams, Michael Kenna, David Burdeny, Michael Levin, David Noton, Edward Weston, Edward Burtynski and Sebastiao Salgado, and the teachings of George DeWolfe, Katie Huisman, Marc Koegel and Alain Briot, and both the work and teachings of Andrea Sirois, Sharon Tenenbaum and Guy Tal. Finally, I am inspired by the writings and publications of Brooks Jensen, author and publisher of “Lenswork”
May 2017