The Zen of Palm Fronds

On a recent grip to Joshua Tree National Park we came across a wonderful oasis that was sort of off the beaten path.

There were a number of palm trees that had not had their fronds trimmed and I found these much more interesting than the usual well-trimmed palm.

One of the finest photography publication today is a magazine called Lenswork. Their print quality is uncompromising.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the magazine is that all of the images are printed in a brown tonality that is close to sepia. I suspect that this is done because of the difficulty of printing a truly neutral black and white image. Whatever the reason, the reproductions are beautifully executed.

I was attempting to create a tonality that was close to that which Lenswork uses. In doing so I tried the above image to see how it would look. To wit, it came alive.

A great image may be a destination, but the journey to get there can sure be interesting!

Photographers Met

One of the great things about being at the Torpedo Factory Art Center is the folks you get to meet and with whom you get to visit.

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting two photographers who were new to me and see the new website of a dear friend and terrific photographer.

At the Torpedo Factory we frequently get school groups visiting because this is one place where they can actually talk to working artists and see them at work. For some groups this is just a day to be out of school but every now and then we get a group of students who really want to visit with us, pick our brains, and get involved with what we are doing.

One such student was Hannah Brookhart. Hannah was very engaging and a terrific photographer. I wish I had had her kind of talent when I was in high school. You can check out her work at her site.

I also met a wonderful photographer, Tre, whose work is some of the most creative I've seen in a long time. You can check out her very modern, creative work here.

Lastly, I'd like to recommend the website of a personal friend, Christine Bernstein. Christine is a wonderful photographer and has traveled the world taking beautiful pictures. Her landscapes are exceptional.

Web Update

If there's anything more boring than updating your website I don't know what it is. There's only one thing that can go right and about a thousand things that can go wrong. It's kind of a constant back and forth between the website and Dreamweaver to catch/correct what you didn't discover when you were doing the update.

Anyhow, I finally did an update to my website by adding three new galleries, XIII, XIV, and XV. Please check them out when you have a chance at www.photographybysteele.com.

Art Speak

In discussing my work recently I stated that I thought the quasi-innovative monochromatic schema represented in my early work had been replaced by my more spontaneous totemic tonality to bring my current vision more in keeping with the current proto-evocative gestural illusionism so rampant in the current art market. I think in the next few years we will see progression to the personal archaistic simultaneity so rejected by current art critics with their limited vision so attuned to the primitive plastic iconography.

This was too good to pass up. A friend gave me an article by Donald Holden in which he created a Chinese Menu for Art Lovers consisting of three columns. You can pick a word from each column and generate totally unintelligible phrases that sound like you know what you are talking about in the art world.

In keeping with the theme, the above pictures of dead, rotten, smelly, decaying fish on the shores of the Salton Sea have been transformed into into the patterned perceptual construction so evident in today's art scene. ;-)

Problems with Firefox

If any of you are using Firefox as your web browser you may have trouble posting comments to the blog. For some reason other browsers seem to work fine but Firefox does not. This problem has been known for sometime but apparently neither blogger or Mozilla seems able/willing to fix it.

Conceptual Art

Conceptual art is so "in" these days. This is art created as the end product of the concept. The concept is everything. The resulting manifestation is almost irrelevant. If you want some really good "art speak" on the subject check out Wikipedia.

It must be difficult to hang a concept on the wall!

A lot of it looks like rejects around which a justification for their existence is created. I often suspect that the "concept" came after-the-fact, not before.

Who Will be Remembered?

I drifted into an interesting discussion with my fellow artists at the Torpedo Factory Art Center. The conversation revolved around who, among photographers living today, will be remembered in a hundred years. That leaves out most of the 20th century's great names.

I'd be very interested in who you think will be remembered and why.