From Raw Material to Dream

Jun 24, 2019 / Photography / mythology / how i create my art

I wrote two weeks ago that photography has a disadvantage of being based on reality. Something has to be in front of the camera for a photograph to result. If this is a negative, why is photography my chosen medium? For precisely the same reason—that photography is based on reality.

Compared to other visual arts, photography is the closest to reality. I want my artwork to have a semblance of reality, such that the viewer has to wonder whether the artwork is “real or not.” I want viewers to feel like they are in a dream. And the way I achieve this dream-like feeling is through my process.

I mentioned a while back that I use photographs as raw material. This is why I don’t post work-in-progress images. Camera images are essentially unfinished. The transformation from raw materials to the finished image of The Unremembered Gate is pretty stark:

Raw materials:

Raw material #1 of sky and the trees, as shown above, comes from an image that I took in a southeastern Maryland golf course!

Raw material #2 is a gate I found around my Baltimore neighborhood. I loved the medieval character of this gate.

Juxtaposed together, I get the final image:

When I took the image of the sky, I didn’t know that it would end up in the final image. I love creating work where I don’t actually know what the final picture will look like–until the moment I create it. I like to create a final image that did not exist in front of the camera.

My work is printed not in color or black & white but using the cyanotype printing process. More than any other printing process, the cyanotype blue heightens the dream-like feeling that I’m going for in my artwork.

To what end?

To elicit a sense of awe, which is one of the purposes of myth.