Land scape
Lee Musgrave
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
When showing references to perceptual reality, your works convey a captivating abstract feeling that provide with dynamism the representative feature of your pieces, as in the ones you exhibited in Fleeting Moments. The way you to capture non-sharpness with an universal kind of language, suspending the viewers between imagination and reality marks out a considerable part of your production. How would you define the relationship between abstraction and representation in your practice? In particular, how does reality and a tendency towards abstraction find their balance in your work?
The balance between realty and abstraction in my work is achieved through thoughtful cropping … and somewhat by being sensitive to differences in scale … the scale of one object to all others in the image and / or to the overall area of the image. This is especially true with regard to texture. The texture of some objects changes dramatically when cropping enlarges the scale of it in proportion to other surfaces in the image. For example, if the image is of snow, mud, and plant debris and I crop a small area out of a large setting, the details in the snow may overpower everything else in the image … which renders the image unworkable. Hence, the balance between reality and abstraction in my images is achieved by profound attention applied to all of the elements( line, color, shape, texture, light) then perceptively cropping them. To add in the process, I tend to crop in manner that favors flat 2-D imaging.
It may sound strange, but while considering where to crop an image, I listen to it speak to me as to where the best place to crop is located. When I ignore that serene voice or can’ t hear it the photo is usually not worth keeping.
For the viewer to appreciate cropping, how much experience they have had studying art compositions becomes very important. In other words, if the viewer has limited experience with the basic principles of composition, they may find my abstract photography images challenging to appreciate and / or comprehend. In many respects, it’ s like asking them to make a giant leap from lyric saturated songs to instrumental jazz or classical orchestrations. The strain can cause them to feel intimidated and to divert their attention toward searching for any identifiable objects within the abstract image and that can be a futile path to follow.
While you once stated that the images you select are defined by your sense for the abstract intangible qualities of light, materials, and composition, we can recognize a successful attempt to provide the elusive nature of light with an almost tactile feature, and it ' s really captivating. How do you view the concepts of the real and the imagined playing out within your works? In particular, is important for you that the viewers attempt to recognize traces of reality and the previous life of the materials you combine?
It is not important to me that viewers of my work attempt to recognize the objects in each of my studio abstract photographs. It is more essential for them to respond to the visual aesthetics of the image before them for if they do, new avenues of understanding our world and hopefully themselves will open for them.
The images I create are defined by my sense for the abstract intangible qualities of light, materials, and composition. From its very beginning photography has been understood as a trace of reality that allows moments that are gone to appear present. It connects with a realm that is beyond our reach and yet