DamnPhotoArtist-Commune

Splay My Heart Upon The Sidewalk

9/30/2019

More from our recent Chalk Art Festival. It’s funny, I spent very little time there and only captured a few shots; it was a hot day and I’d already been out shooting a couple hours prior and I was worn out. But from those few shots I’ve created more works than I’ll get from three times the number of earlier captures. I guess because the shots I captured fit in with new techniques I’m developing; sometimes the magic just works.

This is the most stylistic and abstract of the chalk art works I’ve created. But tell me: If you didn’t know it came from the festival, hadn’t seen the friends holding umbrellas to block the sun from the artists on the sidewalk, how would this imagery strike you? If you didn’t KNOW it came from the chalk art festival does it suggest a figure looking down on a smaller figure prone on the ground beneath? How does it strike you? Is it threatening or simply mysterious or something else? Love to know your thoughts!

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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

Splay My Heart Upon The Sidewalk

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Curtis Hendricks

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