PATTERNS AND TONES

"Three Strikes Park No. 1" from the Sun Shadow Series Sun shadows . Light and dark at the same time. Opposites that make each other exist. I began this series last year so I could have a parameter to study the stark contrasts of light and shadow as well as the textural nature of the bark and concrete. In this newest installation, I wanted to flatten the image into abstraction and then bring it back into a three dimensional form. The pebbles and debris that littered the sidewalk were defined by the late afternoon sun. Their long shadows on small objects reminded me of Ruth Bernhard 's study of light and form in her photograph  "Lifesavers" from 1930. The stark contrasts and simplified forms flattened the image out and became more of a study of spacial geometry. It also reminded me of Piet Mondrian 's non-representational forms in his paintings from his neoplastic period. In post, I began to see the fluttering of butterfly wing patterns, stained glas...

"Griffith Observatory, No. 1" 2014 Lately I have been capturing and creating what I call Sun Shadows . I have been particularly drawn to photographing shadows cast by railings and the geometric patterns they make while interacting with staircases. The steps break the bold shadows into repetitive patterns which create a lovely abstract arrangement.  As I changed their color profile to greyscale, the images began to flatten  out from 3 dimensional lines, into a 2 dimensional plane. If you can remove the initial recognition of the object and let the abstract shapes wash over you, you may begin to see what I mean.  The images are constructed from a form built out of a functional object.  Only the change in scale and frequency of lines give the illusion of the image receding,  reminiscent of the De Stijl or Neo-plasticism artistic movement that came out of the Netherlands in 1917.   Although...