DamnPhotoArtist-Commune

2019 Missouri Top 50

7/19/2019

Honored to have this work selected as one of the Missouri Top 50 to be exhibited at next month’s Missouri State Fair. This is the second straight year my work has been selected for this prestigious award for which hundreds of works are considered, but only 50 chosen. I’m very fortunate to be included.

I saw this photograph, captured early one day in the Portland Place neighborhood off St. Louis’ Forest Park, as an opportunity to combine Autumn vibrancy with morning glow. I filtered it to create an impressionistic diffusion, then used the lighting effects function of my post processing software, as well as a color curves layer, to extenuate the directional light flooding over it from the rising sun. I first included it in a collection of works based around my friends’ home out of frame, off to the left. It’s also the largest, most expensive work I’ve produced in the analog; 16’x24’ metal plate with a satin finish in a partially whitewashed 1½ inch barnwood frame. It’s quite a striking package, if I say so myself, titled ‘A Walk In Peacetime’. I’m delighted and humbled to be able to share it with a broader audience. I have many people whose encouragement I am grateful for.

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Curtis Hendricks

All my life I have had to learn to do things differently. To see the world differently.

Art attracted me from the beginning. Almost every home in the tiny farming village where I grew up had DaVinci’s ‘Last Supper’ on the wall. I would come across modern abstract art in magazines and be absolutely fascinated by the colors and techniques.

But there were no artists in my village. No one understood what modern art was. Or why it was. But there was an appreciation for photography.

I began shooting with a 1960 model Agfa rangefinder fixed-lens 35mm camera and learned to use darkroom techniques to finish my work. Graduating to a single lens reflex camera I worked primarily with Kodachrome. Digital photography opened a new world. The computer became the artboard I never had; the darkroom I could never afford. I discovered there would never be a camera or a lens that could capture what I saw in my head – that, I had to learn to create on my own.

I use the photograph the same way a painter uses a charcoal sketch – as a starting place. I squeeze out the unseen hiding between the pixels; the angels, the demons of my own imagination.

Light. Color. Darkness. Perspective. Introversion. Mystery. Love.

DamnPhotoArtist

2019 Missouri Top 50

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Curtis Hendricks

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