DamnPhotoArtist-Commune

Gateway Into Night

1/10/2020

Yeah, what I said in my last post; forget about most of that. Or rather, it’s a teaching moment.

I couldn’t leave alone my last work, ‘Souls At The Moment Of Night’. The original photographic capture in that work was so good I was going out of my way not to do anything that diminished it. In my dissatisfaction with the outcome, this time I’ve gone completely the opposite direction, starting again with the original, only slightly enhanced, capture. Then I exploded it, fully employing radical abstraction techniques with which I’ve been experimenting.

‘Souls At The Moment Of Night’ leans photographic. This work, ‘Gateway Into Night’, leans artistic. Together, they illustrate a broad range abstract realism may take, or at least may speak to the artistic process. Frankly, there doesn’t seem to be a middle ground; no mediating identity to intercede between the two divergent personalities. Further reinforcing my self-identity as a great bunch of guys.

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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

Gateway Into Night

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Curtis Hendricks

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