Sunday, January 6, 2013

A Beginning.

So many things come to mind when I think of the word 'aerie'. Light, air, wings, flight; a mountain top, a cave, birds and wind and imagination. Dragons. A stunning view, the subject of a poem, the essence of home combined with the essence of the sky. It's an inspiring word to me, and together with the images it evokes, has been a concept I use time and again when I create art.

Breeze, 2011

Not that I would really consider myself an 'artist', persay. I am an artist only insomuch as everyone else in this world is an artist, using my own life as a canvas, my interactions as my paints, my photography and other artistic depictions always serving some greater whole than themselves. I don't use my art as art, I use it as documentation of the canvas of my life at certain times, almost like an in-progress shot, but of a work that will never be finished - a work which only has purpose in the creation of it, not the end result.

Verdant, 2011
 That's not to say that I don't value my own art, or art as a whole. I just see my own work as being part of myself rather than something that stands alone - it cannot be accurately evaluated, cannot be fully understood if understood at all, without knowing who I am, who I was, what I thought, where I stood...

A Little Piece of Heaven - 2008

Take the image above, for instance. I'm sure someone could speak for days about angles and lighting, apertures and focus, but that's not what this piece is to me. This piece to me is the imagination of a child, seeing a beam of sunlight that seems to be an uplifting force in and of itself - a little piece of heaven, so to speak. It's the dream of someone in a dark place, the hope of light to come and show the way.

It's not about how it was taken, it's about why.

Mirror World, 2009
That's not to say that I don't have themes in my work, of course. Every piece I take or make or create is part of a larger whole, and that larger whole does have overarching themes. Light and shadow, contrast, imagination and fantasy, the natural vs. the man made; these are things that can be seen in most if not all of my work in varying degrees, and they're things I enjoy playing with, mixing and matching to create different ideas.
Courage, 2005
Most of my work is photography, sometimes edited in Photoshop to bring out the natural (and occasionally slightly unnatural) qualities of the photograph organically taken. I rarely, if ever, play with settings on my camera aside from the focus; most of what sets what I consider my artwork apart from the pictures I take to remember things or to document an event is in the editing they go through afterwards, to bring out the qualities I saw in taking the picture to be shown in what was actually captured.

Peter Pan, 2010
Not everything I create is that organic, however. Sometimes I enjoy pushing my photography past where it would be able to go on its own, using Photoshop to meld images or create entirely new ones to get across an idea I had when I was taking or going through photos I had already taken.

Ship, 2010
I do prefer to keep these edits subtle; they tell more of a story that way, starting from the natural shot I saw first, then realizing something is different about it. The imagination comes into play with these works as they're looked at.

Glissando, 2010
Imagination is a big deal to me. Fantasy and creativity have been driving factors in my life, so to be able to show pieces that inspire them as much as they were inspired by them is a wonderful feeling.

Stars, 2011
Not all of what I do involves photography, however. I use Photoshop for other things as well, and something I got into big time for several years was creating 'signature images' for people on forums. These allowed me to bring my imagination into play in a new format, one which permitted the addition of words to the mixes of images, and allowed a deeper context to the image by learning such things as where the words, such as lyrics, came from, what the images are, and how they fit together to create a full concept beyond the image provided. They can be beautiful, certainly, but there's more to them than the surface, and a lot of those inner layers can only be understood by knowing background about the piece - who asked for it, why they wanted it, what images I was provided, what images I chose, what they requested, what characters or images are in it, why they chose me to ask...

Cloud, 2012

Using popular characters to create something new is nothing new to me. I've been writing in fandoms since my age was in the single digits, using the characters from TV series, comic books, written books, movies, and video games along with my own imagination to create new worlds and new stories to escape into.

Eridan, 2012
 Since then I've also gotten into a more physical, interactive form of art, called cosplay. Cosplay is a combination of acting and art, story-writing and photography, sculpture and painting... it is a way to relate all of the different things I've loved and learned into one interactive, cohesive whole. My cosplay of Eridan Ampora from the webcomic Homestuck, above, involved everything from painting (skin, clothing, shoes) to sculpture (ears, horns, wand), to sewing (pants, cape) and more, as well as the acting involved in portraying the character and photography in capturing a single image that shows at least some of the work I put into it.

Zexion, 2012

Cosplay is particularly rewarding to me because not only does it give me a chance to play with fantasy, but it allows others interacting with me to use their imagination. Even if they don't know the character, someone talking to me in cosplay will react differently than they would to anyone dressed normally - and they'll remember it, and wonder about it, and perhaps even look up what was going on and why I might have been dressed that way, and potentially discover something they never imagined. And that is more than enough reward for me to keep doing it.

Shadowfight, 2009

Over all, though, what my art is to me is little snapshots in time of who I am. I don't really care if other people love it or hate it, because they don't know the whole story, and it would take centuries to try to explain everything behind any given image or creation. I try to share things that I think will inspire creativity and imagination, but what any person sees in my art depends entirely on that person. There's never an overarching 'meaning' behind any of my work: what it means is what people get out of it.

Radiant, 2009
And that's what life is, isn't it?

1 comment:

  1. Oh My Gosh! These are some amazing photos!! I cannot wait to see more of your artwork!

    ReplyDelete