DamnPhotoArtist-Commune

Autumn Sunbeams

11/25/2019

Off capturing photographs this past mid-September I found myself constantly thinking, ‘You know, dummy, in a month the fall foliage will come out and this shot will look a thousand times better’.

Of course, the month went by and I was preoccupied with other activities and didn’t get back to the scenes where I’d had that thought. So it goes. Which is not to say I didn’t get anything, fall-colors-wise. Creating seasonal art is a rite of passage, or at least a habit – for many artists. Fall foliage now, Christmas art in a month, spring flowers in five or six months. Those are the three categories to which my portfolio is stuffed with work, and still each year I add more of it. That’s because each year I think I’ve done it better than the year before. Each year I’ve learned more, and I get to try new things. Each year the art gets better and justifies continued creation.

Or, arguably, it’s less a justification than a rationalization. I want to BELIEVE the new things are better than the old things so I can keep creating and feel good about it; so I can believe I’m not simply doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. That would be crazy. No – the new work is better. It is. I know it is. At least I think I do.

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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

Autumn Sunbeams

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Curtis Hendricks

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