Sunday, June 26, 2011

No Baggage Here

Unlike music, photography is something different all together. This new medium isn't burdened with a past; a freely open venue for enlightenment. I have recently become aware that some of my photos could be seen from a sensual perspective. Enjoying flowers as I do, occasional connections with the organic organs of a reproductive nature, would of course occur. It is with the utmost naiveté that these images have surfaced; being drawn to each image, per usual...with abandon.

19.Peach Pansy

Subliminally, connections and familiarities may well have been glimpsed but not by any preempted cognition. I feel that it’s important to follow the mysteriousness of these images; even if they lead me to somewhere I’m not comfortable or prepared for.

“I feel there is something unexplored about women that only a woman can explore.”[1]

Georgia O'Keeffe found expression in delicately veiled symbolism yet loathed that her artwork was categorized in such an unsavory manner; denying that her floral paintings had any sexual implications. Nonetheless, O'Keeffe could not escape her sex, being proclaimed as, “an ardent feminist” by the New Yorker. O’Keeffe viewed independence as the single most crucial issue for women.[2]

“I have had to go to men as sources in my painting because the past has left us so

small an inheritance of woman's painting that had widened life.... Before I put a brush to canvas

I question, "Is this mine? Is it all intrinsically of myself?

Is it influenced by some idea or some photograph of an idea which I have acquired from some man?"[3]

20. Alaina’s Necklace

Within photography I have my own clear vision. No one has told me what to see.

Nor, what to do.

The impressionists were the first to consciously offer a subjective alternative to photographs. Particularly where color was concerned.”[4]

As an impressionist in pursuit of spontaneity through sunlight and color, I imagine myself, camera in hand...painting life’s impressions onto my own photo-canvas.


[1] http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/modern/Georgia-OKeeffe.html

[2] Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, by Roxana Robinson (1989), University Press, Hanover. NH. pg.524

[3] http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/modern/Georgia-OKeeffe.html

[4] The Soft Edge; a Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution, by Levinson, Paul (1997), Routledge Books, London and New York.

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