Leaving My Mind Behind: Opening to Form & Aura
My camera came as a result of needing to document my explorative work: painting, paper making and egg dying. Fortuitously, the camera also became a vehicle into a whole other medium. Using macro photography, I can get a much closer look at my subjects. I began to see things that spoke to me, calling for my absolute attention. Paying these images the attention they demanded has opened my life to a plethora of a very personal kind; giving myself over to a concert of colors beyond my hippest-tie-dyed imaginings.
“I found I could say things with colors that I couldn't say in any other way -- things that I had no words for.”[1]
Color makes it for me. Knowing what color looks like, feels like...how could I deny it? An image without color would only be all right if the texture and sound of the
photo was somehow more thrilling without the competition of a whole rainbow of distraction.
Perhaps, I’m a little “light” on the technical aspect of photography, but I do know about composition. Just as I know how a solid sonic composition would sound best, I’m cognizant of visual composition as well. When shooting photos, I spend on average, the first twenty minutes just getting past the mundane. Ordinary. As I play with light, play with form, play with prospective and textures, I lose myself in that play. Forgetting where I am, all other happenings disappear...exhilarated in the flow.
“Making your unknown known is the important thing.”[2]
The importance of this time of letting go: of responsibility, of time, letting go of knowing...has become essential to the work I do today. Permission to follow an artful path - exploring, dissolving into the joy of the unveiling - is something I wouldn’t let myself participate in before now. But here, with this camera, a whole world has opened up to me: delicious, expansive and dotted with stories just waiting to be heard and told.
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