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Curtis Hendricks

DamnPhotoArtist

Photo Art* & Small Literature**
* Computer-based art that uses a photograph as a base
** Short Prose

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Silence Of The Palace Guard

2/3/2020

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Picture
No new techniques at play in this one; nothing especially fancy. Just a good photographic capture at the perfect time of day, cropped to a 1x2 scale. Enhancements to exposure, lighting, saturation and hue, plus filtering for edging and texture to create a dreamscape. I’d call it ‘old school’, except that much of what I’ve done with this work would have constituted new techniques several years ago. New or old is irrelevant. Every work defines its own reality.

* * *

If it’s not recognizable, this is a view of the top of the City Museum in St. Louis, captured from the rooftop of the building next door, The Last Hotel, looking north.

* * *

I did some work for family this past weekend that has me considering my purpose with this medium I call photo art; specifically, both what I’m trying to do and what I’m trying to NOT do. What I DO do, as I’ve stated so many times, is try to reveal the art in everyday things, captured deep within the pixels of digital photography. To accomplish this, the final work must ‘feel’ natural, not forced, not faked, not like I’ve simply taken a picture and applied a watercolor filter. It has to invoke its own vision, a reality that exists in its own universe as an extension of the artist’s imagination.

My nephew, who loves his cars, took a couple pictures and asked if I could do my artsy thing with them. Generally, I shy away from this – I like to control an image from the capture forward if I’m going to claim it as my own work. But he’s family and I love him, and I thought I’d give it a shot – plus, I love automotive art and would like to get better at it, so if nothing else it would serve as a good artsy exercise. While I was doing it, I kept thinking, “It can’t look fake!” It can’t look like I simply took his picture and slopped something over the top of it. It’s got to, as noted above, reflect an artistic vision extending from my own imagination – more difficult to achieve since I hadn’t captured the photograph. But, as it happened, it WAS a good exercise, and I THINK he’s going to be happy with what I’ve come up with; I sure hope so. Art appreciation is subjective. But so is reality …
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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.

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