The Dance of Light

There is a certain beauty to the incidental, unconsidered cell phone picture.  Their interest lies in all of the elements that the photographer traditionally attempts to avoid, the shafts of light invading the field, the broad circles of subtle color superimposed over the subject, the irregular distortions of the outline of an illuminated light bulb, its edges separating into distinct bands of white, yellow and orange.  If we can forget, for a moment, about our accumulated standards of photography, everything we've been taught about what makes a "bad" picture, then these images become captivating studies of the phenomenon of light.  

These are quick reference shots sent by the curator of a venue that we will be showing at in Los Angeles in December.  I am so tempted to just print these 40" x 60" on fine cotton rag paper, hang them on the walls that they depict and call it a day.

New Revisionism

"Adrian Texas. Jul 22th. 1909.  Dear friend:- I will anser your postal now Papa is going in to town so I will have to hurry. From your From your friend marion" Adressed to Miss. Mabel miller, Chatfield Ohio RR#2

I started with a bottle of white-out.  I have this idea of a perfect white plane of unknown dimensions, discovered just under the surface of the soil, as if everything above it was just an elaborate set, staged for the illusion of life. A farmer unearths it in his field. He is horrified by its incomprehensibility.

The old postcard of Panhandle Wheat seemed a good backdrop for a study along these lines. I read the back and hesitated. Can I alter this object, this piece of history, or is it too valuable? 1909. According to Wikipedia, this was the year that the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf Railway was completed in Adrion, Texas and also the year that the American-Canadian Land and Townsite Co. began attracting prospective farmers to the area.  Probably Marion had just arrived by train to the newly established community with her family to take advantage of the nascent Texas wheat boom and she was probably writing to a friend she had just left behind back in Ohio.  The treeless expanse of the Texas Panhandle must have seemed quite a contrast to a girl growing up in the fertile midwest.

But despite, or perhaps because of its resonance, I did want to alter this object. I remembered that I had only paid two dollars for it at an antique store.  Certainly if that was all it was worth, there was no harm in changing it, even if it was a hundred and three years old.  This is how I justified it anyway, knowing that if I thought about it much further I might talk myself out of it.

I thought perhaps I should pencil out the area that I was going to paint, but the lead didn't show up well on the dark foreground, so I started searching through my drawer for a white pencil. I found one that looked to be a bit off-white, but after trying it out I realized that it was actually a sharpenable eraser. So much the better, for the eraser offered a surprising amount of control. Soon my subterranean white plane became more of a white cloud hovering just above the surface. It emerges ominously from just off camera into an otherwise clear day. Is this a foreshadow of the massive dust storms that were to devastate the panhandle in years to come? Where was Marion in 1931 when drought hit the plains and  the over-tilled earth began to blow and the "black blizzards" began? Was she still in Adrian, Texas on Black Sunday when high winds blacked out the sun removing 300 million tons of topsoil from the prairie, burying houses in giant drifts in its wake? How she must have longed then to be back in Ohio with her old friend Mabel.