How exciting when the fuchsias began to bloom. Wild vivid colors. Crazy fairy skirts with spindly legs. And they POP! Yep. The waxy outer layers of the fuchsia bud holds a pillow of air to protect the delicate ruffles inside. When gently squeezed, the buds will pop. You can hear it.
Timing is key. If I let the buds sit too long, the outer skin will have thinned and there will be no pop, only a sad split. Even worse, sometimes the shell will tear. But a successful pop is to be savored. There is a tiny startle at the burst, a satisfying tactile sensation along with the perfect popping sound.
If I reflect on why I enjoy this so much I am taken back to my five-year-old self, totally involved in the simple joy of completely enjoying the sensations of playing with a flower. I am reminded to take the time to reconnect with that innocence. I get near this boundless joy when I explore and exploit the inner workings of nature in my kaleidoscopic artworks.
Pop. Pop. POP!
Add some color your life! Click on an image to see what’s in my store.
When I go to a gallery or museum, I first scan the piece for its visual impact. I might look at composition and color or acknowledge the artist’s cleverness. I then go in close to look at the details and technique. And before I take a step back to review and enjoy the art, I will glance at the title. This can give me an additional glimpse into the artist’s thoughts and expand my understanding of the work. In some cases, the title is the only thing remaining in an artwork, as in Lawrence Weiner’s 1969 conceptual piece A wall pitted by a single air rifle shot.
In The Court Of The Crimson Queen art & base
I find that naming art draws upon my creativity just as much as making it. I want to give my viewers a hint to what they are looking at. In most cases, I will use the botanical or common name of the plant that is my subject matter. But rather than leaving it at an identification, I try to spice it up with a bit of wit. This piece could have easily been titled Pink Rose No. 1; that would help people look for things like rose petals and structure. But using the title In the Court of the Crimson Queen adds even another dimension.
King and the Color Crimson
The title of this artwork is taken from the seminal Progressive Rock number “In the Court of the Crimson King” (King Crimson)—with a gender change. The piece was not created with that in mind. While working with this rose image, I found shapes that reminded me of very feminine slippers and of a fierce guard, maybe from the palace. Without the yellow dot embellishment, this piece is almost monochromatic in the red and pink area. I’m thinking that the word “red” isn’t very feminine or fierce. A quick trip to the Thesaurus gives me “Crimson.” The regal slippers and royal guard say “Queen.” A quick flash to my rock-n-roll past gets me to my very clever title!
Add some color to your life! Click on an image to see what’s in my store.
“The heart of this celestial game board has the power to set the wheel in wildly flamboyant motion. Implosive and explosive in one movement, the resultant green waves cool the player’s fevered brow. The sentinels call out, “Place your bets!” There is no winning, there is no losing, there is only the Game.”
Orchids In Play
My best friend, Robin Panzarella, wrote these words about Orchids In Play. It was one of twelve poems she penned that were inspired by the first twelve pieces of my continuing series of photograph-based kaleidoscopic artworks. I published these poems alongside my artwork as a calendar. I had expected we would be a team for longer, but it wasn’t to be. These twelve poems, unpublished a the time of her passing, continue to fuel my exploration into this form.
The artwork always came first and was completed before Robin wrote the poetry. In this particular piece, however, Robin’s poem inspired me to update my work and embellish the background with an array of dots, like a giant game board.
What fun to work with a flower that already looks like it’s been spun around in a kaleidoscope. I have loved the passion flower since childhood. My grandparents had a large slab with a roof that they called the Summer House. The pillars that supported the roof were covered with passion flower vines. My younger me didn’t really remember the flowers. I was fascinated by the strange fruit that the flower produced. I recall them first looking like an egg, then aging into something akin in texture to a stale marshmallow. I called them Easter Egg Flowers.
Base image for Passiflora Indulgence
I was reminded of the beauty and sensuality of the flower when I decided to grow the vine in my home garden. We had a large fence that would benefit from a clinging vine. The blooms as well as the spiraling tendrils have become subject to several of my artworks. Others include Passion On Grass, New Passion and Passion Tendril Vessel.
The matilija poppy is a sun-loving native of Southern California. It’s large crepe paper blossom with a showy yellow puffball of stamens in its center give it the nickname of “fried egg plant.” The photograph that inspired “Matilija Prairie Installation” presents the delicate flower and furry seed pod against a brilliant blue sky.
I never go into my work with specific intentions. Each component is created on the fly, based on what I feel is needed for the current artwork. I find a photograph I love and then work within my process to find the pieces to assemble. This means taking the photograph into a software environment (U&I Software’s ArtMatic Designer) that I use to make the various reflections. I don’t know what the results will be when I begin to explore the parameters of the reflections. I find faces and insects; there might be seductive openings. I keep changing setting, looking more images that please me.
In this piece, I found an intriguing structure created by reflecting the seed pod. I thought it looked like the turn-key in an old windup toy or maybe nautical cleats. The white square structure felt like a stretched canvas, slightly bowed in at the edges, now held down by these cleats. Also holding down the canvas is the bottom layer that breaches the bounds of the white layer on top. The petal layers have a celebratory air, particularly when festooned with dots. They almost seem to jump of the surface. In the heart of the piece, the blue sky is used to balance with color and dimension.
A montage of images use to create Peace Lily Nouveau
The peace lily exudes calm and serenity. Its starkly beautiful form and chaste simplicity easily flow into languid patterns.
At my third session creating artwork on site at the LA County Arboretum, the weather was gloomy. The diffused lighting allowed me to capture the delicate differences in the shades of white that cannot be captured when the lighting is bright.
I will return to the Arboretum on Saturday, June 4, 2016 (11:00 AM to 4:30 PM) for my fourth and final time making art there in conjunction with my exhibition,”Reflections in the Garden.” I will once again take up residence in the Gallery at the Arboretum Library, creating another artwork on site!
My kaleidoscopic artworks are still on display at the Gallery at The Los Angeles County Arboretum. The show, Reflections In The Garden runs through the end of June, and is housed in the Arboretum’s newly renovated Library.
I’m happy to announce that I will be demonstrating my creation process on four separate occasions, onsite at the gallery. I’m taking my camera and computer and will create a new piece, from start to finish over a five hour period. In each session, I will begin by taking photographs around the Arboretum grounds. I will select an image to work with and then make several layers of the image, reflected in many ways. I will continue with my process until I (hopefully) finish an artwork. Come watch me work.
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Join me at the Arboretum!
To get to the Gallery at The Los Angeles County Arboretum, go to the main entrance and the Library is immediately to the left, through the double doors. Admission or membership are required to tour the grounds, however it is not required to visit the Library.
Bird Paradise base imageArtmatic graphic synthesizer
Every one of my kaleidoscopic artworks starts with a photograph. I’m going to use as an example the piece Bird OParadise. As you might have guessed, the subject is the bird of paradise flower. The sturdy purple and orange blossom shows up against a muted green background. They come together for a natural display of secondary colors. Pay special attention to the blue-violet flower petal speckled in dewdrops emerging from the structural flower’s beak-like sheath or spathe.
I import the base image into a graphic synthesizer program (ArtMatic) for manipulation. The photograph is filtered through a variety of mathematical transformations—stretched, bent and reflected through fractals, polar space and fun-house mirrors. Interesting results are saved as key-frames that can be rendered into large-scale graphic files.
Twelve foundlings for Bird OParadise
The key-framing process allows an image to be animated over time (videos) however, for this series, I only capture the still frames, instructing the software to render the kaleidoscopic reflections. I call the resulting images “foundlings.” I collect the foundlings and tuck them away in a folder, preparing for a digital collage.
Masked foundling
After creating several foundlings, I examine them in large scale—sorting, selecting and sometimes creating more, as the artwork requires. I prepare the selected foundlings in Adobe Photoshop using a technique called masking (think of a digital X-acto with a lot more control). I gather the masked foundling into layers and manipulate the light and shadow to enhance the illusion of depth in the finished artwork.
I was working on Judaic Art but had hit a roadblock. I wanted to have my designs custom printed on silk to make into prayer shawls (tallit). The results were beautiful, but the cost was too high to make them profitable. I was frustrated and needed another artistic outlet.
In January of 2011, I attended an inspirational seminar, Matrix Energetics. And while I did not become a practitioner like my brother, it did lead me to begin my series of photography-based kaleidoscopic artwork. When I got home, I created the first piece, Magnolia Pod-me Hum. The base image is a magnolia pod from a tree in my garden. It was placed there by my landscape designer as his gift to me and as a reminder of his business, Mother Magnolia.
Base image for Magnolia Pod-me Hum
I was looking though the various experimentations I had done with U&I Software’s Artmatic, a modular graphics synthesizer that I enjoyed fiddling with. I found an example I made from a piece of beach rock marked with holes. It was a simple reflection without any further manipulation. But it gave me the spark to play around with the idea of incorporating photographs into the six-pointed stars I had been creating in Artmatic and manipulating in Photoshop.
Holey Beach Rock
An idea was born. I used the Artmatic parameter tree (see blog post, Where did it all begin? Part 1) from Holey Beach Rock as my starter point. I made many variations on the theme with the photograph of my magnolia pod as the source. I took the resulting renders and imported them into Photoshop to be masked, shaded and layered. I decided the result needed a little something extra so I put in little versions of the magnolia pod and some dots. I can’t remember why I decided to try dots, but they seemed to work and added an extra something. The result was Magnolia Pod-me Hum–the first of what would become a series in excess of eighty pieces and still growing.
In the beginning, I set myself up with some rules, kind of like an assignment. I alway said that I work best under assignment. This time it didn’t come from the outside. My pieces would be made from a single photograph. They would be six-sided symmetry. They would have dots. I made eleven pieces like that until I created Rose Frills In Four which is titled such because I used a four-sided symmetry. Then with twelve pieces in the series, I made my second calendar.
