DamnPhotoArtist-Commune

Flowers On Mars

9/9/2019

Are any rules being followed here? Composition, Rule Of Thirds and all that? Focal point – is there one?

One of the very first works I sold was like today’s photo art – no focal point at all. Just a field of golden, tall grass that I had edged and saturated. It was exactly what the customer was looking for – just a blast of color coming at her. No rules, little artsy fartsy expression or textbook form or dramatic moodiness. A liability of being serious about our art is that we take ourselves too seriously, like a movie drenched with a director’s self-absorption to the point of irrelevance. Form over function.

That it’s “Art” does not foster immunity from “who give a shit”.

I captured a sharp macro of the tiny blooming flowers of a bush (yeah, no, I don’t know what it’s called), softened it, added texturing and increased the red saturation. I cropped it down even tighter and added an additional light source from the upper right, just enough to add visual interest without detracting from that blast of color which is, after all, the point.

Sometimes art reveals itself in the rules the artist doesn’t follow.

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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

Flowers On Mars

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Curtis Hendricks

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