“If I only had the time…”   I don’t prescribe to this, for as a card carrying member of the “authentic booked to the teeth club”, I know people can always make time if they want to and this social conundrum is not worth further artistic exploration (unless Roger Waters and David Gilmour were to collaborate with Tiesto and release “Dark Side of the Moon: The Remixes”).  In that case, check please.

“If I only realized…”  Now that is a much more applicable and quality life excuse that my work consistently aims to remedy.

It is true that their isn’t anything as consuming or that disallows a person from taking in the world that surrounds them than the consistent maintenance that their own life requires.  So many distractions, relationships and difficult decisions often cloud the mind and the eyes to connect in effort to recognize the unfathomable beauty that surrounds and sustains our vitality.  There is, of course, the awe-inspiring constructions and creations of man, our conscious expressions of color and form that make up the consistent knowledge of the world we know.  The Urban landscape is generally home for most and nature seeps through only in increments, and in doing so, rarely puts its best foot forward (see grass on lawn).  Even so, the hustle and bustle of the day-to-day does not promote moments of repose and allows even the more recognizably beautiful elements of nature to fall comfortably into obscurity.  As mentioned, I too live this busy life, but am a devout advocate of taking pause and looking closer or of corrective retina surgery that transforms one’s eyes into microscopes.

Time is short as we all note and I feel there is so much peace and solace to be found within all of our given senses if we would only indulge in what actually surrounds.  Nothing on this planet is banal – not a moment we experience and certainly not a sight we take in.  In my most recent fine art series, GeoVanity, the gesture is simply to capsulate that thought process in a series of images that capture haunting beauty in nature’s most basic elements that are passed by, stepped over, and often denied the full effect of their existence.  It is a mission to make one stop and recognize the complex life that abides in stillness and emotes through utter inanimatation.

I have always felt it chief amongst my responsibilities as an artist and as an image maker to carve through the mess of commonality and expectable capture to find the perspectives of the world around us that reveal what we wouldn’t otherwise see.  To me, objects register not with heightened color or texture but simply with a recognition and understanding of how light affects both and what is the latent content whether in shadow or highlight.  This, if anything, applies to experience, the same way a broker can make and educated prognosis on a stock.  However, the content and identification of the formal gesture can reach beyond the given experience of the image maker and provide my desired result of revelation.  Such is the case when I stumble across any reasonable idea for a body of work.

With GeoVanity, it was intensity of the subtle and still natural detail that overwhelmed my senses and scolded my eyes for not capturing some of earth’s most simplistic visual arrangements sooner.  The power of this recognition lies in big part to what did not make its way into the image.  The frame is the utter key to each and every piece within the series.  Though our own eyes view the world without boundary, we certainly view the world with focus.  Despite our periphery, we do form an imaginary frame and compose the world as we choose to see it with every passing glance.  I took this basic principle into consideration when determining what I wanted each landscape to reveal beyond the formal qualities that would be captured, and regardless of the setting, I found an excess of the proper décor to complete the body of work.  Whether sand, rock, water, or wood, the lines formed within the compositions are meant to dance around the frame with ferocity, the colors meant enliven and erase any passive thought about the true potential of nature’s spectrum.  Depth and spatial reference cease to exist as my intention was to create landscapes that are dressed in the illusion of aerial terrain or maintain content arrangement and texture similar to abstract works of art.  The tight rope I aimed to walk upon was disallowing the pieces to lose a clear recognition of the actual natural element being captured.  The further idea was to use the strongest lines or most dominating colors to act as the visual catalysts to tie the rest of the frame together in the most unpredictable manner. For example, if a spatter of green filled a lower portion of the frame, but dominated the visual presence of the compositions, I felt it was key to use the remaining space, negative or otherwise, to be supplemental with regards to color, and disjunctive with regards to depth of field.  The illusory qualities of the entire piece aim to create the ethereal aura that transforms and otherwise banal photograph into a still that portrays a glimpse into another world.

As much as the body of work operates from the thematic perspective of indentifying the moment within the larger scope, it is facilitated by formal qualities that even surprised me when I set out to create it.  The photographs revealed the potential to capture colors that the naked eye cannot.  Hidden within shadow and coming to be as a result of nature’s course, the most incredible hues and color arrangements revealed themselves throughout the works – the harmonious, but definitive warm palettes of the wooded pieces, the complimentary and bold palettes on the sediment, the tonal malleability of water and the subsequent saturation from what the sun and given location would allow.  I found a complexity and unpredictability of texture sometimes that would emphasize itself without a shallow depth of field.  In other instances it was exactly the choice of focus that would allow for the proper amount of intimacy from either near or a far within the images chosen structure.

The actual process of identifying a proper sect of the landscape to feature was quite simple and not unlike the normal method for which I choose subject matter to compose in any genre I shoot.  There must be a skeletal structure which invites a purely aesthetic, or quite simply, a gut pleasure.  This has nothing to do with texture or color but simply the formal way in which the lines dictate the eyes movement throughout the frame.  The next step for me was to understand the physical content I was capturing, the best distance to represent it at and what I could gain or lose in consideration of light and how broad the my focal range should be.  The last two considerations are the dual catalysts that often stand out as the most striking elements within the body of work – the color and the texture.  Color is not defined in its saturation, nor its absence, but it remains an aspect of any art form that lends importance through its relative harmony or disharmony with the surrounding tones.  Often color is overlooked or misrecognized and I think that couldn’t be clearer within this body of work.  Vibrant reds, blues and yellows exist in varied tones within what most would assume to be the drab and monochromatic palette that nature offers.  I found this not only to exist upon the obvious reflection in sand on the beach, but to find bold colors that stood out and clarified their presence in the less obvious realms of sediment and bark.  Texture, in my opinion, is the factor that truly differentiates the body of work from piece to piece.  The ability to feel these works was a crucial consideration as the spatial ambiguity and overall sensory experience relies on the viewer’s ability to engage and feel the coarse ridges, sharp edges, and silky streams that would brush against their hands and feet.

The name GeoVanity is born out of an attempt to bring irony to an otherwise humble body of work.  While the content is bold, textured and colorful at first glance, it certainly goes beyond the expectation of what defines the reality of what is captured.  It was vital that these small pieces of life and earth had a chance to expound upon their own beauty with grace, but more importantly, with spot lit attitude.  This is a chance for earth to be in vogue and for the neglected to bask in the glamorous attention a photo affords.  It is the very vanity that I aimed to capture which I’m hopeful will push viewers to take pause and slow down.  If it’s not to take in the world around them, then it’s to spend the rest of their life in seconds and aim to commit otherwise forgotten moments yet to be experienced in formation of a more comprehensive encyclopedia of their own existence.  These images don’t speak about the past and despite their dream-like quality, don’t aim to conjure up the existential and expressionistic undertones laden within similar modern works of art.  These photos are about now.  Sense of smell is a powerful ally of memory, but sense of sight is undoubtedly the stalwart of experience.  I want these images to promote the power of the present through revelation.  There is too much in life to get caught up in and never enough to get caught up with.  GeoVanity is my vision of the earth, and that vision says everything is worth a closer look.