(embiggenable) • iPhone
(embiggenable) • iPhone
WITHOUT A DOUBT I CAN WRITE THAT I am, predominately, a visual thinker (as opposed to a word thinker). Being a visual thinker is not something that I learned, rather, it is a personal character trait that I eventually realized is what I am and have been for my entire life. And, that is what led me to, without considering anything else, creating visual things in my professional and personal picture making life.
In my professional and personal picture making life-as well as many other "visual" aspects in my life-I never once thought about the art aesthetic aspects of my work as a commercial photographer and graphic designer-the why or the how I created work that looked like it did. I just did it. It was all created intuitively and/or by "feel".
It was not until I became seriously involved in my personal "art" picture making-when I started to be interested in the idea of what is a photograph?-that started to realize that, to my eye and sensibilities, my pictures were not about what-the depicted referent-I pictured but about how I saw and pictured whatever the depicted referent was. Without question, I was much more interested in how my pictures, the thing itself (when printed), looked rather than what they depicted.
Which is why, when I found the following excerpt (from an article about visual thinking), I felt that I had discovered something very important about who and what I am....
...fundamentals in visual thinking lay the ground work for many design disciplines such as art and architecture*. Two of the most influential aspects of visual composition in these disciplines are patterns and color. Patterns and color are not only prevalent in many different aspects of everyday life, but it is also telling about our interpretation of the world.
I could probably use this excerpt as the basis for an artist statement which accurately defines my work and how I see / interpret the world I live in.
* I started college as a student of architecture. Did not like the career path that it entailed. Dropped out. Got drafted. Sent to Japan. Discovered photography and asked to become a US ARMY photographer. Request granted. The rest is history.