At the end of this school year in June, the Graduate Studies program I'm in will be having a gallery opening. One challenge of planing such an event is coming up with a title and an image for your poster and related promotional items. Over the last few weeks as a group we've been discussing show titles, layout and so forth. A lot of what we came up with were general words or ideas to represent us each having very different arrays and styles of work. We are now close to certain deadlines and we've all been asked to pick a selection of our favourite titles for the next class after March break. I decided, while I have a bit of time to think, why not make up some images to go with the titles and give my self a chance to really play with some concepts I've been thinking about. I'll post the title and image one by one and give a little explanation behind the technic and concept.
Number 1
"Full Spectrum"
A fairly simple idea, but a difficult execution. I started with the idea of having three painted colours merge into three rays of light of the same colours. I picked the three primary colours, red, yellow and blue, and then gelled my flashes in the background with the same colours. The painted panel was held in place high and far enough to block out the flash heads while still leaving the distant background visible. Lining this up on my own was a nightmare. Then I lit the front of the painting from below and shot all at once, no HDR, stitching or another photoshop tricks, other then brightening the lit background. The colour from the lights merged a bit, as I expected, so I really like that this actually worked out. The concept is, you start with the basic elements and it merges into something bright and beautiful.
Number 2
"Acronym For Art"
A very simple idea, execution was also fairly simple. I've been playing with overhead projections as of late and thought it would work well in this case. The idea is a play off the word "acronym" and that in a sense what we describe as our studio practise can been used in that fashion to substitute for the word "art". The mind bubble and the words are projected onto the backdrop and the shadow is created from the light of the projector. Originally I was in the shot, but removed myself from the image in photoshop. The purple colour is created from a flash head I used to help expose the image better, in my research the colour purple is seen to represent inspiration. I like this image and idea.
Number 3
"The Modern Struggle of Art"
This one might be a bit to dark for everyone, and is definitely a more surreal and abstract image then the other two. Again this uses projections and flashes with coloured gels, and a long exposer time. I don't really know what to say about this image, I just really love it. But again, this is more my style then one that really represents everyone.
Well that's all for now.
-Larry M. Holder
