jocksturges

The pipe ='s phallic symbol transaction was specific to one painting but symptomatic of the larger metaphor underpinning all of Magritte's work -- the materialization of Jung's symbolic analysis of the human experience in the actuality of paint. So, no he wouldn't be done in declaring that the picture's metaphoric errand was one specific thing unless whatever that was was an integrated part of a larger, cohesive endeavor. I put no specific qualifier on the word endeavor there because I see no limit to the number of angles one can take into this thing. What is manifest does not have to come from any given corner of human thought. But thought there must be. Or else we are just being posed answerless riddles.

I do agree that words are limited -- and the more so by the time I have to write them -- hardly any. This leaves me feeling imprecise and fairly dumb as often as not but one does the best one can.

jock

"It is meant to be surreal"

When you invoke the "surreal" (as it is famously easy to do in Photoshop) you change the rules with which we decode the reality you present. You are in effect suggesting that this lanscape, left to its own devices, could not/did not convey to you, the viewer and recorder, the message that you wanted to impart. So you changed it. What is implied - and absolutely so - is that you have changed the metaphoric balance of the image for a reason == to bring us to realizations/perceptions we would not otherwise have reached. This is a bold act. When you do this you take on an almost god-like power to suggest to us that we are to be led by the hand to a new and different appreciation of the world that we would otherwise have been blind to. The suggestion is not trivial. We all depend on our senses to provide us with a balanced view of our world so that we know what it is and who we are in it. Altering this is subversive, revolutionary -- radical in an important way.

The danger of course is that people who change things in this wayvery often do so quite simply because they can - without any sense of the weight of the metaphor they have altered. It is not enough to say that one has altered an image simply "to be surreal" because that is superficial and arbitrary and finally, because there is in fact no answer to the riddle that has been posed, boring. Imagine a child posing you a complex riddle that takes some time to express and when you finally give up trying to guess its meaning and ask what the answer is, there is not and never was one. Perhaps you are amused for a moment but if the child in question begins again to attempt to hold you attention with another such conundrum it would be surprising if your patience endured for very long...

You are a photographic artist so of course you are free to play and experiment to the same extent that all artists always have been. I would be the last person to discourage you to do so. But I do not know why the sky is black and white in this image and "just because I can" is not near enough for me. If you wish to make me or the world at large care about your work in the profound way that I hope is your ambition then its language must be persistent and there must be a fullfilling errand in its apprehension.

When the surreal school of painting came to the fore from 1910 onward for a bit (I'm a little rusty on the dates but they're not that important) it had thousands of adherents. There are now only a very small handful left holding any lasting place in the regard of the fine art world. Perhaps the greatest of these is Magritte. Why? Because there was an aswer to all his riddles - in Karl Jung's work in fact. The riddle of his painting of a pipe entitled "This is Not a Pipe" has an answer. It is a phallic symbol.

Your pictures is immensely well crafted and visually arresting -- you have without question an excellent technical grasp of the medium. What I would hope would be next is vertical movement in the medium as opposed to horizontal. By this I mean making more pictures like this one will not advance you -- that would be horizontal movement. What is left is to improve the "why" behind the technique. That is the one course that would move you up.

Forgive me for my lack of reluctance ion voiceing my many opinions. I am embarked on an almost certainly quixotic endeavor to attempt to speak of art in a landscape where most all of the vocabulary is mechanical. Silly of me.

jock sturges

If you take a figure out of context and shoot them either in the studio or in circumstances that mimic the studio, you do not relinquish responsibility for your ground. This figure is well lit and is projecting fairly good emotion. But the artifice of the acting is amplifed by the artifice of the featurless context and finally the result is not as believable as it might have been. Your technical exercise with lighting the figure is pretty good. But you would have made an even stronger picture if you had thought as much about the ground and how it could have been organized to advance the image's pschological purpose. That might not be easy of course -- but then you get back what you put in -- or don't.

jock sturges

This is what I mean. Make love manifest and suddenly you are in art's true theater. This is one of the most moving portraits of a son by his father that I have ever seen. I have looked at it for a long time and the more I do, the more I find. So simple. So perfect.

For the photoshop legions, politely: the best way to convey the truth is to leave it alone. Please. It's not about making a perfect picture. It's about accepting the perfection of what was there.

jock sturges

Very strong portrait. Unsetteling in a good way. True. This is what I look for most in good phtographs!

jock sturges

That photshop can deliver a lovely and compelling result is here to see. Beautiful image. But I hope that you might realize that what is rare in your work has more to do with emotional connection than technique and that succumbing to Pshop's seductions will ultimately only serve to bury that. Because we all know that what happens in Pshop isn't "true". And artifice can never be more beautiful than life itself. You have a wonderful gift for emotional connection with your children's portraits. The more you make your work about that and the less about technique the further the work will go in the long run. Aim high.

I'm sort of a fussy art world type so don't take what I say too seriously. You are making beautiful work and nothing can detract from that. When I see someone as good as you are come along, though, I can not help sticking an oar in to encourage them to go even further.

jock sturges