The movement from one year to the next is always a good time to reflect on what you are leaving behind and what you imagine to lie ahead. After I returned from India, I jumped quickly back into my life at home in Atlanta, Georgia, with my family, friends, work and pleasures.
I reflected on the trip in Chandigarh, and knew that I wanted to incorporate all that saw and felt in India into a body of work that would be displayed at The Artists Atelier Studios and Gallery in October 2013 for Atlanta Celebrates Photography, a month-long celebration of fine art photography.
But showing large photographs, as beautiful as they are, wasn't enough. I wanted to convey the layers upon layers of textures and colors that I saw in India wherever I turned. At first I wanted to use whitewash, a lime-based wash that is used on homes and walls all over the world and that softens the final colors. Lime is extremely caustic, so I settled for plaster and some commercial paint products that facilitate surface crazing and cracking.
In the end, I developed a unique technique that involves applying plaster or a commercial cracking medium first to a wood surface. Then I transfer the pigment of the photograph to the surface with a matte medium to develop an image that is lighter than the original and that has imperfections where the pigment is torn away from the plaster surface.
I reflected on the trip in Chandigarh, and knew that I wanted to incorporate all that saw and felt in India into a body of work that would be displayed at The Artists Atelier Studios and Gallery in October 2013 for Atlanta Celebrates Photography, a month-long celebration of fine art photography.
But showing large photographs, as beautiful as they are, wasn't enough. I wanted to convey the layers upon layers of textures and colors that I saw in India wherever I turned. At first I wanted to use whitewash, a lime-based wash that is used on homes and walls all over the world and that softens the final colors. Lime is extremely caustic, so I settled for plaster and some commercial paint products that facilitate surface crazing and cracking.
In the end, I developed a unique technique that involves applying plaster or a commercial cracking medium first to a wood surface. Then I transfer the pigment of the photograph to the surface with a matte medium to develop an image that is lighter than the original and that has imperfections where the pigment is torn away from the plaster surface.
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I experimented with different textures for the base and ultimately I was pleased with the integration of the base and the transferred photographs. Then, one day, while using this technique, I started to cover some of the exposed areas with collage pieces from the photographs, and I liked that also.
This is a detail of one of the pieces and the collage areas where I couldn't stop myself from adding colored strips to enhance the picture. Below is a view of the total picture once finished:
This ended up being one of my favorite pieces. I love the colors, the shapes and the distressed areas created by the transfer of the photo. Le me know what you think about the technique.
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