Thinking about Picasso’s portrait of Dora Maar, I always understood he was trying to capture the face in different directions on one page. His painted face is not frozen in time like we do now with the smart phone. Photographs always have seemed frozen to me. Ever since, at 22 years old, I photographed the dancers of the Netherlands Dance Theatre in long exposure, I knew there was more to just a picture. Still the result was a two dimensional reality with a suggestion of time to it. Dance to me is the highest form of art. To capture motion has been my mission.
Everything in nature moves. Some artists before me have tried to capture movement in the two dimensional reality. One of them was Muybridge who made frozen pictures of moving people or animals and put them together in a row. Now, more than 130 years later, Muybridge’s work is seen as both an innovation in photography and the science of movement. It made me think about motion, movement, and the concept of time.
The image is the information, the composition, you can share it on devices, you can output it as a print, you can cover a shirt with it, but then the picture is a physical thing. ( I have a storage full of ‘physical things’) Visual studies like drawing and painting to me is about the expression of seeing as a part of the whole experience.
Photography has made us aware of the past as broken up into moments. It is always fragmented.
Paintings on the other hand have more potential because in the parts that are filled with abstractions, we can allow our timeless dreams enter those spaces. Everything in nature moves. I want to capture that movement as an intrinsic part of the whole experience of making a painting. Let me share where it leads me.
Here is a tour of my studio, https://vimeo.com/931512569?share=copy
Northlight studio’s, 357 Depot street, Asheville
