May 11, 2022
JC Art Club Fine Art Exhibit Opens At Capital Arts
Each year the Jefferson City Art Club, in conjunction with Capital Arts, holds an annual adult Fine Arts Exhibit (yeah, they hold another one for youth) that brings in many local artists, both amateur and professional. It’s also a judged competition with art divided by category and awards given in each. It’s the categories that make it a bit different. The oil paintings aren’t judged against the watercolors, which aren’t judged against the acrylics, and certainly not against the photo art. When I began exhibiting, photo art wasn’t even recognized, and photography was only accepted if it were “right out of the camera”, which, I pointed out repeatedly, doesn’t exist. Both the local art community and the club itself have grown significantly since, with new mediums and artists coming emerging onto the scene.
This year it established the categories ‘Film Photography / Darkroom’, ‘Photo-Based Digital Art’, and ‘Digital Art Not Photo-Based’. That’s closer if not perfectly focused (pun intended). The hang up seems to be comprehending computer-based art. Its emergence into the art realm may be as jarring as was that of photography was a century ago (and some would say still is).
One has to ask why categories are necessary; certainly, many other galleries hold judged exhibitions without differentiating mediums. Awards are doled out on the strength of each work, regardless of the materials or methods used to create it. That said, I gotta admit, as computer-based art in general and photo art in specific are only just emerging, and subsequently not well understood among traditionalists, recognition can be fleeting. The categories the Art Club uses at least brings attention and analysis of computer-based arts as legitimate forms of creative expression. I just wish there were more of us coming forward. I know they’re out there. I know there are artists – mostly young artists – sitting at their computers or holding their iPads and creating incredible work. Somehow, they’re not yet motivated to come forth and exhibit. That’s the next arena for change.
What I hope my submissions this year - which fall into the Photo-Based Digital Art category - reflect is the great breadth that photo art can cover. ‘February’ is as much straight photography as anything in the ‘Photography/Darkroom’ category; I just used the computer to make those slight adjusts to exposure and clarity instead of an enlargement easel. The tool is different, but the techniques are exactly the same. On the other side of the spectrum, ‘Shades Of Plenty’ is a much more altered reflection of reality. Extreme color, layered filtering together with 3-D filtering to create depth in the sky, Not quite abstract; just enough discernable lines to be recognizable. This epitomizes the style of Abstract Realism I’m working in. ‘Into The Light’ uses just enough filtering and edging to cross over from photography to Photo Art. The original photographic capture came during a visit to the Wonders Of Wildlife National Museum and Aquarium in Springfield, Missouri. Taken from the bottom of an enormous fish tank and pointing up, this view is probably captured a hundred times a day. But, as far as I know, there’s only one that looks like this. ‘In The Blind Spot’ is representative of the automotive art I’ve been working on. It looks very simple. In fact, the original capture has to be separated into three parts, each requiring very different techniques, then blended back together. That separation has to be so precise it has to be affected almost pixel to pixel, demanding extremely close work.
Of course, the show is not about me – I’m just a small part of it. There are so many great works that deserve to be seen and savored. Check out the Capital Arts web site at www.capitalarts.org to find a time to visit!
This year it established the categories ‘Film Photography / Darkroom’, ‘Photo-Based Digital Art’, and ‘Digital Art Not Photo-Based’. That’s closer if not perfectly focused (pun intended). The hang up seems to be comprehending computer-based art. Its emergence into the art realm may be as jarring as was that of photography was a century ago (and some would say still is).
One has to ask why categories are necessary; certainly, many other galleries hold judged exhibitions without differentiating mediums. Awards are doled out on the strength of each work, regardless of the materials or methods used to create it. That said, I gotta admit, as computer-based art in general and photo art in specific are only just emerging, and subsequently not well understood among traditionalists, recognition can be fleeting. The categories the Art Club uses at least brings attention and analysis of computer-based arts as legitimate forms of creative expression. I just wish there were more of us coming forward. I know they’re out there. I know there are artists – mostly young artists – sitting at their computers or holding their iPads and creating incredible work. Somehow, they’re not yet motivated to come forth and exhibit. That’s the next arena for change.
What I hope my submissions this year - which fall into the Photo-Based Digital Art category - reflect is the great breadth that photo art can cover. ‘February’ is as much straight photography as anything in the ‘Photography/Darkroom’ category; I just used the computer to make those slight adjusts to exposure and clarity instead of an enlargement easel. The tool is different, but the techniques are exactly the same. On the other side of the spectrum, ‘Shades Of Plenty’ is a much more altered reflection of reality. Extreme color, layered filtering together with 3-D filtering to create depth in the sky, Not quite abstract; just enough discernable lines to be recognizable. This epitomizes the style of Abstract Realism I’m working in. ‘Into The Light’ uses just enough filtering and edging to cross over from photography to Photo Art. The original photographic capture came during a visit to the Wonders Of Wildlife National Museum and Aquarium in Springfield, Missouri. Taken from the bottom of an enormous fish tank and pointing up, this view is probably captured a hundred times a day. But, as far as I know, there’s only one that looks like this. ‘In The Blind Spot’ is representative of the automotive art I’ve been working on. It looks very simple. In fact, the original capture has to be separated into three parts, each requiring very different techniques, then blended back together. That separation has to be so precise it has to be affected almost pixel to pixel, demanding extremely close work.
Of course, the show is not about me – I’m just a small part of it. There are so many great works that deserve to be seen and savored. Check out the Capital Arts web site at www.capitalarts.org to find a time to visit!
May 2, 2022
'The Wanderers' At The Columbia Art League
Beginning May 3 the Columbia Art League opens their new exhibit, ‘Interior’, and if I may quote the gallery’s own description on its web site, “What does it mean to be on the inside”, or paraphrasing further, “pertaining to that which is within”.
I’ve any number of still lives I thought about submitting, but in the end it had to be ‘The Wanderers’, one of my most important pieces, maybe my most important recent work. The original photographic capture came in the concourse of Busch Stadium in St. Louis. But I actually sat down with it on the computer a couple weeks later, on a day I was miserable. My arthritis was flaring badly, and I’d been prescribed a medicine that had me absolutely scratching at my brain. I had in mind to do a cityscape of a sort I’d done in the past, but the lighting wasn’t right. Nothing seemed to be working. I began reaching with that scrambled brain in directions I’d never tried before, combinations of filters and layers and blends that pushed way beyond anything I’d thought about. This was the first time I created different files of the same work, each one breaking the original capture into different pieces and working with each differently, then blending them all back together into a single composite. When I finished I had to sit back, mouth agape, and ask myself “what the hell did I just do”? Since then I’ve used these techniques many times, creating works I’m quite proud of and establishing an entire subset of my portfolio. But this was the first one. A work that mimics a wandering mind, thoughts moving randomly, form and formlessness, shuffling in a thousand directions at once.
The exhibit runs through June 9, with a reception the evening of May 13.
I’ve any number of still lives I thought about submitting, but in the end it had to be ‘The Wanderers’, one of my most important pieces, maybe my most important recent work. The original photographic capture came in the concourse of Busch Stadium in St. Louis. But I actually sat down with it on the computer a couple weeks later, on a day I was miserable. My arthritis was flaring badly, and I’d been prescribed a medicine that had me absolutely scratching at my brain. I had in mind to do a cityscape of a sort I’d done in the past, but the lighting wasn’t right. Nothing seemed to be working. I began reaching with that scrambled brain in directions I’d never tried before, combinations of filters and layers and blends that pushed way beyond anything I’d thought about. This was the first time I created different files of the same work, each one breaking the original capture into different pieces and working with each differently, then blending them all back together into a single composite. When I finished I had to sit back, mouth agape, and ask myself “what the hell did I just do”? Since then I’ve used these techniques many times, creating works I’m quite proud of and establishing an entire subset of my portfolio. But this was the first one. A work that mimics a wandering mind, thoughts moving randomly, form and formlessness, shuffling in a thousand directions at once.
The exhibit runs through June 9, with a reception the evening of May 13.
March 23, 2022
Grand Opening of Damn Photo Artist Redesign!
The Damn Photo Artist website is now redesigned with cleaner, more attractive headers, clearer navigation, and a less confusing structure.
To begin with, photo art and prose now have their own blog pages, respectively called Create and Compose (I've populated each with a few works from the old site, just to get things rolling). No more confusing whether the art goes with the story, or the story goes with the art or the nature of duality or any of that. And no more waiting to post one until I've completed something of the other. To that end, the old Commune page which combined both is gone. Buried and gone, and with it several years of archives. One of the problems the old design was running into was that the website was having trouble differentiating between old works and new. Not the fault of the website builder (Weebly, you're okay, really, highly recommend you!) but related to my own filing structure which carried identically numbered works across different years. One might scroll the archives and find work that was just posted last week in its place. Won't happen now, bro.
About archives: There won't be any. By default, each blog page includes an archive that simply fills with every post ever posted. The result was, I felt, was a pile of stuff both a) hard to navigate through and b) easy for the nefarious to steal, watermarks or no. So henceforth, new posts of both photo art and prose will hang around for a month / six-weeks and then go bye-bye.
There are new pricing charts on the Collect page to make purchases easier, and clearer ways to reach out to me on the Communicate page. Finally, this new Home page you're on right now will be a more efficient means for announcements, news, and exhibition notices. And everything can be more precisely linked to social media as appropriate.
We begin anew, folks. Welcome home!