Inspiration – Page 5 – Deidre Adams

How I celebrate the New Year

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Deno’s 6&85 ©2009 Deidre Adams.

It seems that the beginning of a new year is a time for most people to want to take stock of their lives and to resolve to change themselves in some way. I decided a long time ago that making resolutions was a sure setup for failure. So, although there is a tiny nagging sense of guilt that I should be working to improve myself in some way, I pass on the whole resolution thing and just allow myself to enjoy the day. Is that because I’m weakwilled? Perhaps, but I much prefer to live in the moment than to spend the day in deep introspection, self-absorption and recriminations, thinking about how I should change myself.

So, yesterday when I saw that it was a beautiful warm day with striking clouds — my optimal picture-taking scenario — I decided it was time to take advantage of a quiet traffic day and go up north to Commerce City to get some shots of Deno’s 6&85 restaurant, with this fabulous old sign. I’m not sure why, but it evidently has some claim to fame, as it’s the poster child for the “truck stop” entry on Wikipedia. I’d heard that they had closed, so I thought I’d better get up there before it got torn down. I was quite surprised to find that it’s now plastered with ugly banners announcing that they’re now open under new management. Kind of ruined the atmosphere I was hoping for, but whaddaya gonna do!

adams-denos-closeup1

Here’s a closeup of the sign in which you can see a couple of the current residents. These birds were quite happy and noisy yesterday, giving the whole scene an oddly surreal spring-like feeling, there on the first day of January, 2009.

We spent some time driving around Commerce City, a great urban exploration area, for other photo opportunities. Late in the afternoon, the sun came poking through a cloudbank and produced this great scene in the concrete labyrinth that lives underneath I-70:

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Underpass. ©2009 Deidre Adams.

Disclaimer: All of these images are tweaked in Adobe Lightroom, to which I am now heavily addicted.

But to get back to the New Year’s theme, I got a bonus in my e-mail today in the form of permission for my lazy behavior. This comes from Robert Genn’s Twice Weekly Newsletter, which I subscribed to a while ago. Although most of what he offers is a rehash of the same-old stuff that you’ve heard a gazillion times if you’ve been around awhile, every now and then there is a gem worth contemplating. Today’s offering is called How to Find Passion. I read through the typical life turnaround story barely paying attention, but there were a couple of steps in his how-to list that made me stop in my tracks:

Consider your dreams to be private, unique and sacred….
Don’t talk about it, do it.

OK, great. Gotta stop talking about it, and go do it. Until next time, then!

January 2nd, 2009|Inspiration, Photography|6 Comments

Concrete Cathedrals — Robert L. Jones

I haven’t posted for awhile because I’m deep in the throes of updating my web site — I thought the break between semesters would be a good time for that. But for some reason, I always underestimate the scope of this project and it always takes so much longer than it ought to. I needed to take a breather from that and think about something else for a bit, and looking at work by other photographers is always a worthwhile endeavor.

San Antonio, Texas, January, 2001 ©Robert L. Jones

Robert L. Jones is a photographer and writer with whom I’ve corresponded off and on for a couple of years after he contacted me through my web site. I’ve not met him personally, but his work really appeals to me because a lot of it has a reverence for the same things that I am drawn to: the anachronistic image of a place that time seems to have forgotten, a chance composition discovered by looking down at the ground, and the majestic grain elevator.

This latter subject is a particular specialty of Jones’, and it’s obvious from the title he gives them that he holds them in high esteem. I’ve learned from looking at these photos that the oddly tilted perspective appearing unbidden in some of my own work is not a thing to be repudiated, but is rather something to be embraced for the dynamic presence it imparts to an image of a static subject. I’m especially intrigued by the above image because of the abrupt shift in the tonal value of the building on the right. It draws me in to thinking about what might have happened here: were they still in the process of painting this building when the photo was taken, or had they long since given up, interrupted by perhaps a financial disaster and never to return to the project? (I suppose I could research the matter and find out, but I prefer to wonder.) This demarcation line also forms a continuation of the strong diagonal started by the building on the left, creating a compelling composition.

Jones is something of a purist in his methods, preferring to work with film and doing his own developing and printing on coveted favorite papers, painstakingly working to perfect his technique, and refraining from fully accepting the label of “artist” until he feels he has done so. I find this admirable in our age of instant gratification. However, I must take just a tiny bit of exception to one thing he says in a discussion of his philosophy: “More so than any other artistic medium, photographers pride themselves in mastering technique, i.e., craft, and in perfecting each stage of the … process.” It isn’t that I don’t believe photographers do this, it’s just that I know artists in other media do so also, as I am personally aware of many textile artists who are completely obsessesed with perfecting their process. It seems that photography suffers some of the same crisis of identity that textile art suffers: is it art, or is it a craft?

I guess I’ll go out on a limb here — how could such a framing of the Phillips 66 station in its Technicolor brilliance be anything other than art?

December 23rd, 2008|Inspiration|4 Comments

Kwang-Young Chun, Aggregations

This summer I’m taking a class called Hand Papermaking for Artists. It’s being taught by one of my favorite teachers at MSCD, Bonnie Ferrill Roman, who is also a fabulous artist. She uses handmade paper, branches, and other objects from nature in her sculpture work.

The class has been a lot of fun and very informative so far. In addition to hands-on experimentation with different ways of making and using paper (who knew there were so many!), the class also requires doing research on papermaking and artists who work in this media. I had to do a short research paper on an artist of my choice, and I chose Kwang-Young Chun. For several months, I have had a page with a large image of one his works torn from an issue of Artforum pinned up on my design wall. I’ve been looking at it for a long time because I find it fascinating, but now this research paper has provided a good impetus to find out more about his work and process.

Chun is a Korean artist who makes his work by wrapping small styrofoam triangles in mulberry paper taken from old books that he buys in large quantities and stores in an air-conditioned warehouse. After wrapping, each piece is tied with more paper that has been twisted into a narrow rope. Hundreds or thousands of these units are then combined into larger constructions, which might take the form of huge free-standing sculptures or low-relief wall pieces. See more of his work here, and a fabulous close-up detail here.

The areas that look like craters are created with trompe l’oeil effects rendered by varying the size and shading of the units in different areas of the piece. This is the kind of work that I find immensely satisfying. I love to imagine the endless hours and hours of patient, meditative process, wrapping and tying, and meticulous fitting of the thousands of pieces into a coherent, cohesive whole. The idea that someone would choose to spend his time in this way instead of sitting in front of a television or in a shopping mall gives me a great sense of hope and well being.

July 6th, 2008|Inspiration, School|3 Comments