DamnPhotoArtist-Commune

Beautiful Anguish

11/21/2018

Here's the thing about autumn works. All these beautiful, irresistible, orange and yellow and red saturated artworks.

It's dying. Everything beautiful is dying and the colors are final, pleading screams.

Is it rage? Is it desperation? Is it confusion? What's the sequence - anger, denial, bargaining, grief, and finally acceptance? No, definitely not acceptance. Nothing is going along with it. Autumn is one, big, bloody brawl for the right to live. Autumn is war. And in the end, of course, Death hurls ice and snow and cold wind as though gloating. Look closely at a blizzard, squint, there's a smile in there just daring anything to try to stay alive.

There's a con job happening here. Life puts up it's Autumn fight, pretends to die, retreats, and when Death drops its guard, sprouts back spreading its gorgeous green everywhere across the landscape. Or is it Death only pretending to be defeated? It too returns. Is it less a war than a dance requiring different wardrobes for different seasons? And how do we fit in?

Now enough of this heavy Zen crap!

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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

Beautiful Anguish

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Curtis Hendricks

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