DamnPhotoArtist-Commune

Snow Assault

1/12/2019

A version of this very new photo capture went out on social media just last night as more than a foot of snow fell to earth in huge, wet, clumped globs. It's Friday night, right, so I'm shooting in my jammies off my deck using my iPhone and the Camera+2 app after downing a shot and a beer and a plate of chicken wings. Back in my easy chair under a blankie I used that same app to crop and edit the capture to bring the gold winter glow out of the sky and increase the field depth. Out to social media it went.

It was half finished.

Last night's edit brought out the glow in the sky but lost the cool of the snow. This morning in Photoshop I corrected that, sharpened parts of the capture and softened the edges, added just enough texture, and increased the resolution. It was a good exercise in taking the mobile app as far as it could go to create art, then taking it further and with the computer. The computer facilitates both greater accuracy and greater creativity, but lacks the immediacy of the mobile app. The juxtaposition of that also illustrates the continuous evolution of photo art. Simply moving from a simple device to a complex one changes the nature of the art. And in a year I will be able to take both version or the original and evolve them further.

Begging the question, when is an artist finished with a single work? Answer: when they turn their back on it, or their heart stops.

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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

Snow Assault

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Curtis Hendricks

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