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We are Not Two, and We are Not One
16 x 20 inch Canvas Wrap $250
It is our nature to experience ourselves in some ways separate,
yet always in relationship. As apart, but interdependent.
As a product of the energies that make us up;
and as a vital part of those energies ourselves.
Detail:
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We are Not One, and We are Not Two
16 x 20 inch Canvas Wrap $250
And if we seem at times to be an interpenetrating convergence of
changing light, it is
the light of a vast, extrapersonal, innocent and exuberant joy -- the
joy
of a universe where birth and destruction, light and dark, form and
chaos, life and death co-create one another in the great songs that
sing us into being.
Detail:
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Tapestry
at the Edge of Dawn
16 x 20 inch Canvas Wrap $250
Out of the diamond of blackness at the center, a deep red light continues
to pour, like the first ragged threads that will eventually become the
tapestry of dawn.
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Emerging
30 x 40 inch Canvas Wrap $750
Also available in 40x60 and 60x80 inches
"Emerging" was created from a single photograph of lights, taken with a
moving camera. The image was selected, cropped, and mirrored onto
itself to bring out the patterns.
This piece kept telling me that it needed to be BIG -- big enough to
call to you quietly from the other side of the room, where it looks
like a few subtly scintillating columns. Big enough that, when you come
within a foot of it, it takes you and fills your vision with the swirl
of creation and destruction, of interpenetrating but independent forms,
a suggestion of the eternal dance of energy and matter whose unending
flow maintains us as it passes through to create other
things.
Some may find such thoughts alienating, but I find them invigorating,
and I love the images in "Emerging" for suggesting the swirl of energy
at the border between chaos and order that gives out and takes back
everything we can imagine or experience or know. Including what we so
tenderly know as one another. And as ourselves.
We need categories that interpenetrate -- where in and out take place
at once, birth and death include each other -- where our ideas of joy
and suffering, perfection and raggedness, eternal and ephemeral allow
us to experience ourselves as we are -- emerging.
To zoom in on a large version of this image, go to this
site (requires Flash):
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Tapestry
at the Edge of Dawn, detail
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Full
Moon Rising Over Vero Beach, triptych
3 images at 11 x 11 inches each. Canvas Wrap $250
Some events are so powerful that they cannot be represented as
themselves but must be represented by a symbolic image that may not
even look much like the actual thing, especially when the thing, like
the moonrise, so dramatically changes everything around it when it
appears raising the land itself in tides of sand.
In this image, I tried to suggest the feeling of the waves, the
surge and suck of the surf, the way the unapproachable, unavoidable
light pulls at every fluid in your being, creating tides inside us,
hurling us into a huge cavern of mysterious light, reminding us of
our separateness yet uniting us with the axis of the universe -- the full moon rising as clear and simple as a paradox.
Every detail in these three images comes from a single long-exposure
photograph of the moon, with a flash at the end that caught the edge of
the beach and surf. The orange pattern in the middle is the full moon
itself, spun by the dance of a moving camera, then folded onto itself
into a totemic symbol that suggests a mysterious and cosmic symmetry.
Parts of the same photograph were then folded onto themselves to
produce the patterns that surround -- like the night and sea and shore
-- the moon-image in the middle of each picture.
Naturally,
I wondered what the phases of a totem moon would be like -- and
found that they are like two burning birds that meet to ignite the
moon:
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Arriving
by an Unfamiliar Route
16 x 20 inch Canvas Wrap $250
This is an unaltered digital photograph, just as it came out of the dancing
camera. It has been cropped slightly to fit the proportions of the
print, but nothing else.
Most of the photos I took with a moving camera ran the gamut from
uninteresting to dull -- curious little experiments. Some looked like
failed attempts at postmodernism (if such a thing is possible). But
there is already enough weird art in the world, so I let those lie.
Some images contained sections I could select and work up into richer images
like the ones in this exhibit.
A few arrived as complete surprises, like this one.
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How These Images Were Made
These images were made by a secret process I will divulge only to you.
(You won’t tell anyone, will you?)
I go somewhere at night where there are lights -- you know, Christmas
lights, street lights, traffic lights, house lights, mall lights, pool
lights, flashlights, neon lights, security lights -- even the moon.
Then I take a long, handheld picture of the lights. That's it! -- Well,
almost.
While the shutter is open for a second or two, I deliberately move the
camera.
Maybe “move” isn't quite the word for it. I, well (don't tell anybody!)
sort of, you see, dance
with the camera. Luckily, I'm always in the dark, so nobody sees this
aging former professor trying to remember how he felt watching Charlie
Chaplin movies. But that's all:
I dance with the camera in the presence of light.
The
technique is as simple as drawing -- where you just place a pencil on
paper and move your hand. In this case, you move the paper (the camera)
while keeping the pens (the
lights) still. Anybody can do it.
The
process produces a large collection of unexpected images, almost all of
which are failures. In that "almost," though, are a few images that
speak to me, and I work with them,
often by
folding some part of the image back onto itself, mirroring and
multiplying it.
In these images, every line is the result of a movement I made with the camera.
This method has enabled me to create shapes and patterns I would not
know how to draw, or even to imagine. Making them has been an experiment and a discovery.
I didn't set out to make pictures, or to do anything other than recover
some of the freedom and happiness I felt as a boy playing with whatever
came to hand -- in this case, a camera. And to do this in the
context of nearly 70 years of living. I sought things that brought me a
feeling of creative joy -- and I did them as someone whose path
followed an unchartable game-trail through life's landscape and ended
up in the mysteries of my own back yard.
In perhaps two
out of a hundred pictures, I found an image that seemed to reflect one
of life's puzzles I had mulled over for 50 years -- and sometimes found
a hint of what it
feels like to be alive on this amazing earth in those moments you sense
the incredible energy of the universe pouring through all things,
interpenetrating and interconnecting everything, sustaining the vibrant
reality that makes existence possible.
But I could never say that, because it would sound even more ridiculous
than I must look waving that camera around. Except maybe to
whisper it, just to you. You won't tell anyone, will you?
-- Gerald Grow,
Tallahassee, July 2011
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Detail from "Emerging," showing
the tiny whale that emerged:
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Gerald Grow with the study for a larger version of "Emerging." (Photo: Mike Abrams)
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Three pictures recently on exhibit.
The one of the left is a canvas wrap, mounted on the regular stretcher
bars used in an artist's canvas, with part of the image wrapped around
the edges so the picture stands off from the wall by 3/4 or 1-1/2
inches and does not require a frame.
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