More preliminary shots

Sun and raindrops. Very close up and out of focus.

Preliminary shots

Here are some shots I’ve taken as a start on the abstract idea. These are mostly based on Uta Barth’s work. They are taken with long exposure and most of them are purposely unfocused. They are all about light. I photographed some fire jugglers on bonfire night.

Ori Gersht – Rear Window

Relevant to abstract idea.

These images by Ori Gersht were taken out of his window. They are my favourite out of all his images. The images focus more on the colours of the sky than the city below. You see a small strip of the city, the lights, but it isn’t the main focus of the images. We see how the sky is affected by cities. The colours are more vibrant and varied because of pollution and the gleam of city lights. I absolutely love these images. They make us seems so little and unimportant. We’re just a tiny strip at the bottom. There’s the entire universe above us.

Ori Gersht – Liquidation, Flowers

Relevant to Abstract idea.

Liquidation

These photos look so much like paintings to me. Which is the idea I want to explore in my SDA. They remind me of Uta Barth’s work, but are still quite different. I think I like the top one better because you can actually see a landscape in that one and it has more colour than the bottom one. The bottom one is more a hint of something that might be there behind the fog. You don’t know what is it or what is might look like. The few hints at colour and shape lead me to believe this also is a landscape, probably quite similar to the one above it.

Flowers

The reason I included this image is its colours. The image is almost devoid of any colour and the few colours that are there really stand out. This fascinates me.

Ori Gersht – Blow Up, Hide and Seek

Relevant to Abstract idea.

Blow Up

I wonder how anyone can come up with the idea of blowing up flowers and photographing it. It’s wonderfully strange and abstract. The photos are no longer about showing flowers, it’s about colour, form and experimentation. I think Gersht is exploring the classic still life of flowers in a vase and making a comment on it. Maybe he wants to say that it’s time for something new. Maybe he just wanted to do something crazy for fun. The black background in these images remind me further of the classic flower still life that we so often see in paintings. By blowing up the flowers, though, this is no longer a ‘still’ life. It is very much a moving image. There is action and motion. They remind me slightly of fireworks. Just a bang of colours that look beautiful.

Hide and Seek

This body of work has a completely different feel to it than the blow up flowers. This is all about stillness. The images seenm to be very quiet whereas the ones above seem to be teeming with noise. The colours are all pastel and the light is very soft. I understand well from looking at the images why he calls them hide and seek. One is a foggy landscape, one is photographed from behind lots of leaves, one from behind a curtain. They all seem to be hiding in some way. Is the photographer hiding or is it someone else that we can’t see? The title of the work immeadiately makes me think of childhood and games, but the images speak of things more serious and very different, I feel.

My favourite of these images is the last one, the one with the leaves. I don’t know why that is, but it really speaks to me. I think it might be the combination of leaves and water. And the colour yellow. Maybe. The lines of the trees are also wonderful. The reflection in the water makes a reflection which adds another quality to the image.

Wassily Kandinsky

Relevant to abstract idea.

Colour! That is what I love about Kandinsky’s paintings. They are abstract and many of them just look like lots of geometrical shapes put together, but they are wonderfully colourful. I want to focus a lot on colour in my abstract idea, so these paintings are perfect for inspiration.

Mark Rothko

Relevant to abstract idea.

Mark Rothko‘s later work is what I’m most interested in. He started out with quite an expressionistic style, but his later work involves only blocks of colour. It’s quite interesting that I’m using Rothko as an inspiration, becasue I tend to not like artists whose work is this simple. Many modern artists make artwork that look so simple anyone could have made it. I want to be able to see in a paintng that an artist made it. That it took creativity and skill to make an image. I really like Rothko’s work. He was very good at combining colours and making beautiful images. It takes skill to see what colour combinations work. And it definitely takes skill to make something so simple look so beautiful.

 

Susan Derges – Star Field

Relevant to abstract idea.

I really like the composition of these images. Even though they aren’t taken with a camera, they are perfectly composed. The vegetation stretches up like a trees. I like the perspective.

Susan Derges – Moons

Relevant to abstract idea.

I really love these. The vegetation becomes even more like silhouettes against the moon. They are really wonderful. The first one here, particularly appeals to me. I don’t know if that is because it’s different to the others, or what, but I really love it. It has a different format than the other images. It’s probably cropped. I like that she’s made the dandelions so big against the moon (which is also very big in this). I also like the colour. Most of the other images are blue, which is quite natural, but this one is golden brown. Very sunset-like colour. It is very soft.

Susan Derges – River Taw

Relevant to abstract idea.

Susan Derges is a photographer who makes images of nature, mostly. She ofter doesn’t use a camera in her photography, but makes photograms. In her series ‘River Taw’, she placed photographic paper underneath the ice in a frozen river and let the natural light create the images on the paper. This means that her images are not reproducible in the way that other photos usually are. There is no negative. The photo is created directly onto the photo paper. Of course with scanners and digital technology of today they become reproducible, but not in the same way. This makes her images even more special, I think. There is only ever one original of these images.

I think these images are really beautiful. They are all about shape and colours. They really balance on the boundaries of painting and photography. I love the patterns in the images that are created by the movement of the water. I find the colours quite interesting. That there are different colours to the images, although they’re all created the same way. I wonder why that is. How has one of the images come out red and one green? Blue is easier to understand…

I call these images abstract, even though we can clearly see leaves and branches. I do this because they aren’t more than a shadow of what they’re depicting. An exact shadow, but a shadow nonetheless.