Reconnaissance

Reconnaissance was the last work that I made before my exhibition at The Eugenio Granell Fundación in Santiago de Compostela Spain in 2016. I was working very quickly and went through some mockup ideas from several years earlier and discovered this wooden artifact, which is a lipstick case, made of caribou horn from Mindanao The Philippines. I am fortunate my spouse has a collection of items from the Philippines and The Netherlands that I have photographed for my archive.

The small lipstick case when closed is round, but small pieces can be pulled from the sides, which is where the women put their lipstick. I thought it was a beautiful shape, but I had never been able to find a way to put it in context. I began to experiment with a dried tulip petal and thought that the shape, texture and color worked well together.

I began to stack pieces of the lipstick case and the tulip petal to give it depth and to create a diagonal shape so that the composition could be asymmetrical. Once the combined shape was completed, I needed to find a location in which to place it. By reflecting on the shape, I realized the small pieces on the side of the lipstick case reminded me of sails on a ship.

I went through my photographs and found one of the sailboats off the Magic Island in Waikiki. I cut out the sails and created a horizon line and placed the lipstick case above it to simulate a sun. I next began to look for a good sky for the background and discovered one made at the North Shore right before sunset. The dramatic sky framed the lipstick case well, but the bottom was still empty. I searched through many photographs of ocean water to find the right one. I did not want the water to be active and detract from the sky and lipstick case. I found a deep-sea photograph made on a sailboat off the shore of Waikiki, but the color did not match the sky. I color adjusted the water to work well with the sky using adjustment layers. At this point, the piece might have been finished, but the bottom water seemed empty. I also wanted to add a directional upward force to lead the eye to the lipstick case.

Continuing my theme of sails, the idea of a sunken skip came to mine because I had seen the hull of the sunken ship The Amsterdam on the coast of in Hasting England the year before. I added parts of the lipstick case to the bottom and blended and added shadows to make them appear to be coming up out of the ocean. Because of the association with sailing, I decided to call the work Reconnaissance,

Spectral Shift

I love working with color, and I found an excellent opportunity to do so with the piece Invitation that has a bright orange acting as the sun. This piece was my response to the 2019 Peculiar Mormryid 8 As Above, So Below: Surrealism and the Weather,

Initially, I had no idea how to respond to the concept “Is surrealism able to thrive as a weathervane” during this period of global warming and “adapting to new and shifting climates?” I recalled a photograph I had taken years earlier of a sliced orange sitting in icy snow and thought it might be an excellent place to start. I blended the snow above the orange into a cheerful bright blue sky.

The bottom was empty and I felt that there needed to be a human element added since the theme was about the response to global warming and the impact on civilization. While looking through my archive I found a photograph of people standing on The Waikiki “Wall” - an eight-foot tall pier-like structure that parallels the beach. Large waves were splashing into the back of the people giving the photograph a bright sparkling quality that reminded me of the snow. I pieced together parts of a photograph to create the row of people along the bottom edge. After I was finished I thought the orange was too dark and lacked detail. I set up studio lights and photographs a new orange that included water drops to make it glisten. I cut out the new orange and used a mask to replace the original orange sitting in the snow.

Creating these pieces require reflection as the concepts gradually unfold. The additions, revision and refinements are closely related to my early work as a printmaker and typically take around a month to complete.

Invitation

The piece Invitation was a response to a surrealist journal 2017 Peculiar Mormyrid 6 Call for the Nocturnal.

The concept was to show our deepest, darkest desires “when you step out under the stars.” The works were published anonymously so that we would submit work without being concerned what others would think. My response was the piece Invitation in which I portrayed sensuality and sexuality.

I began with the male figure photographed in 2016 at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I replaced the center of the shield with the opening to an old birdhouse to create a dark center. I echoed the shape of the shield with repeating pieces of a dark red flower I found at Biltmore Estate in Asheville North Carolina to give it depth and color.

At this point it did not seem complete. I decide to give it a luscious appearance by hand-painting water dripping from the center. To complete Invitation I added the spiral shell motif to give it a high-energy spinning quality. In addition to sensuality and sexuality, my goal was to create a piece that shows the universal life balance of yin and yang.

Naturalglacé

Naturalglacé, the work that is on the exhibition postcard, was made from three pieces of Delft pottery. My wife is Dutch and I have been to The Netherlands several times. In 2013 we went to a Delft “factory” which surprisingly was a small house type building in Delft. We were able to watch them hand paint the pottery.

At home, we have antique Delft items one of which is a large glass platter with a landscape on it. It occurred to me to use the platter landscape as a background and I began to develop the concept. I blended the top part of the platter above the mountains with a bright blue sky also photographed in The Netherlands.

I remembered photographing two Delft apples in 2018 while walking through the Central area of The Hague and decided to use one of them as the focal point of the composition. The solution was too simple so I digitally cut out the bird from one of the Delft apples and make it appear to land on the apple. The composition still needed more and I blended a shell spiral into the center of the apple. I often use the spiral motif as a reference to The Golden Ratio. I used masks and numerous adjustment layers to blend everything together including hand painting shadows where needed.

Interlude

I began using figurative elements in my work in 2016 after my exhibition at the The Eugenio Granell Fundación in Santiago de Compostela Spain. Up until that time, my work was a combination of landscapes and objects. The decision to incorporate figurative elements was in response to themes from surrealist journals that suggested the human element.

Initially I used photographs of sculpture, such as the piece Invitation, but wanted the freedom of taking photographs in a photographic studio. My first model photo sessions resulted in Awakening, Entrust and Interlude.

Interlude was produced for Peculiar Mormyrid The Polymorph bodyshop, a surrealist game and exhibition, held at The Bakery, Atlanta, Georgia in 2019. The theme suggested using a body part “that has broken free from its body.

The musical instrument in Interlude is a hurdy-gurdy I photographed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I added a female and a male hand from my studio sessions to reflect the yin and yang in life - the balance of our inner nature that combines masculine and feminine energy.

I wanted to place the hurdy-gurdy and hands into an environment and choose a stone bench I photographed while in Porto do Son Spain. The bench provided a good foreground and had orange lichen that related well to the color of the hurdy-gurdy. Through blending I made the hurdy-gurdy merge or grow out of the bench. Circular shapes from the hurdy-gurdy were added in the sky to make the hands appear to be juggling.

Five photographs were used to create Interlude.

The male and female figures were photographed in two different sessions and the lighting was slightly different as were their skin tones. It required considerable effort to make the hands work well together requiring multiple test proofs. I gradually achieved similar color and contrast with curves, levels, and hue and saturation adjustment layers in Photoshop. Notice the green box around the adjustment layers used to unify the color and contrast of the hands.

Awakening

When I was completing my MFA in Printmaking and Photography at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa Alabama in the 1970s, my instructor’s were predominately male. I was also an active participant in the Raudelunas, TransMuseq and Glass Veal scene in Tuscaloosa at that time. Although there were other women participants including LaDonna Smith and Anne LeBaron, the majority was male. Due to this male influence, my work did not reflect who I was as a woman. This was the South in the 1970s and the women’s movement was a dream. After graduation I worked for several years without sharing my art with anyone. This isolation allowed me to reflect on who I was as an artist and begin to work from a female perspective. That early awareness is embodied in my 2019 work Awakening.

The process I used to create Awakening has taken many years to develop. After I finished graduate school, I wanted to be able to continue working as a printmaker but did not have access to a stone lithography press or a stone. As a substitute, I began to make large prints of my photography and to hand-color them to simulate my lithography. I became bored with just having a single image and began to cut the prints to make photographic collage. I continued with this process until I moved to Hawaii in 1998 where I no longer had access to a home photography studio. While in Hawaii I began to teach early graphic software on the computer and as the software and equipment became more advanced, I was gradually able to develop a process that was similar to my hand-colored photo-collage and my early lithography.

I am committed to only working with my own photography. Awakening was created in Photoshop from a studio photograph of a model, several photographs of tulips to create the lush foreground and a sky for a background. The blending of the figure into the sky and the soft edges around her fingertips were made by adding a mask to the figure and by using an airbrush tool by hand to soften the edge of the mask.

I now call my fully digital approach transmorgraphy since my process expands and informs contemporary surrealist printmaking, photography, photo-collage, and digital media.