Category: Personal

The “Artified” Photograph

Cat Nap

Because I painted for many years in traditional media (oils and acrylics), I’ve always had mixed feelings about photographs that are photoshopped to look like paintings. I always thought of it as cheating. There is a certain aesthetic and sense of awe that goes with knowing that someone actually physically created a visually stunning work of art with brushes and paint, and that they may have spent weeks, months, or even years completing it. Well, I’ve had to readjust my thinking a little.

In a previous post I wrote a tutorial about how mediocre photos can be transformed into stunning black and white images. Today I want to talk about other options for photos that would otherwise be headed for the trash bin. They may be a bit blurry, orange, unflattering, uninteresting, or whatever. While it’s true that many do belong in the trash, others may have a little something . . . even if you can’t quite put your finger on it right away. This is how it begins.

I tend to take a LOT of photos, which has led to my son referring to me some years ago as the paparazzi – inaccurate in my opinion because I don’t stalk celebrities. However, in certain situations, I will just keep shooting. For example, the photo above is one of about thirty during an impromptu “session” that began while we were waiting at a pub for my daughter-in-law to get off work and join us. I just happened to have my little Canon Powershot SD780 with me. Nobody was posing – it was just a case of mom playing with one of her toys again. Last night while doing some computer housekeeping, I came very close to deleting the entire series, one picture at a time. Eventually getting down to a handful of so-so pics that I just couldn’t bring myself to get rid of,  I was determined to make them work. Enter Topaz.

Almost deleted this one!

Topaz is a photo-editing plug-in that has a lot of presets with effects that you can customize. Anyway, feeling that the photos were unsalvageable with basic editing, I decided to try out various effects (that were frankly quite hideous), but then I stumbled upon one that worked. I gasped. It definitely looked like a painting – one with the style and subject-matter loosely reminiscent of a Normal Rockwell. So I gave the same treatment to half a dozen others, adjusted the colour tones in Lightroom, and posted three on my son’s Facebook wall. He must have been impressed because he made one of them his profile pic.

Now I have a different perspective on “artified” photographs. Although I don’t plan on going crazy with it, at least I know that there are options for saving some photos from being deleted forever.

 

 

Photography ~ Natural Wonders

It’s been two months since I got my DSLR Canon Rebel T3i 600D, and I can’t seem to put it down. One of my absolute favourite subjects in grade nine was biology, and had things gone a little differently, there’s a good chance I would have pursued a career in science. It’s true what they say — that a teacher can totally affect a student’s life, in either a negative, or positive manner. In my case it was disappointingly so.

In the 1970s it was common in the remote community of Timmins for foreign teachers to spend a year or two in one of the schools at the beginning of their teaching careers. Being in the French Catholic system, I had two Haitian teachers (a married couple) in grades seven and eight, whom I absolutely adored, and on the flip side… there was this muscle-bound, blond and bearded uber-French Adonis-type who liked to strut and torture kids. I’m serious… he would sneak up from behind and whack students’ hands on their desks with a wooden yard stick. But the thing he got the most sadistic pleasure out of was in giving what we called “Indian Sunburns.” This consisted of him wringing and twisting someone’s wrist like a dish rag until the skin turned red. He was known as Hercules on school grounds, and I have no idea why he was not arrested, or at the very least, fired.

Anyway… as I was saying… biology was my favourite subject in grade nine, and I signed up for grade ten biology for the following year with great anticipation. Before I go on, it’s important to understand that the French spoken in northern Ontario is very colloquial and particular to that region of Canada. There are accents, and then there are accents. The first day of grade ten biology, we all filed into the classroom to find our seats as we whispered amongst ourselves about the new, and very sombre face sitting behind the teacher’s desk. This guy was tight-lipped, high-strung, and dead serious. I don’t remember him ever coming out from behind his desk. I knew immediately that this was going to be nothing like the lively, inquisitive atmosphere with our bubbly and enthusiastic teacher of the previous year, but nothing could have prepared me for what ultimately happened.

Mr. X began the class, and a number of students shot nervous looks at each other. I think we were all thinking the same thing — we could barely understand a word he was saying. He spoke in a rapid-fire, possibly Franco-African accent (completely foreign to our young northern Ontario ears), and when asked a question, or for him to repeat anything, the response was more rapid-fire patois, only with an annoyed edge to it. I tried really hard to hack it through the first week, but didn’t make it. I just couldn’t understand what the man was saying. I dropped out of the course with a heavy heart, one thing lead to another, and here I am today giving my friends the heebie-jeebies with random [scientific] photos of whatever creepy-crawlies happen to cross my path. Above is a small selection, but if you’re into bugs, you can see some awesome flies and spiders in my Bugs and Stuff Facebook Album. Enjoy!

 

Mother and Child Relief Sculpture

Completed "Mother and Child" with final bronze patina.
“Mother and Child,” cement fondue, 36 x 48 inches (approx.)

Mother and Child is a relief sculpture that I made while studying at the University of Guelph. The assignment was to design an abstract relief sculpture for the lobby of a hospice, but I was having difficulty because the anniversary of my own child’s death was approaching. My professor, the Canadian sculptor John Fillion, was critical of my preliminary sketches (because they were too “soft and round” apparently), but after learning my story he spoke at length about the German artist, Kathe Kollwitz, and the depth of her work around death, dying, and loss. To my surprise, he suggested that I do a figurative piece. I don’t remember if it was him or me who selected Kollwitz’s 1903 etching, Mother and Dead Child… somehow I think it was him. In any case, I used models, including my son, a friend, and myself in order to render and personalize the figures.

Kathe Kollwitz, "Mother and Dead Child," Etching, 1903
Kathe Kollwitz, “Mother and Dead Child,” Etching, 1903

Mother and Child did hang on my wall for a few years, but it has been in storage up north since 2001 when I took a teaching contract in Mexico. This August 2nd, I’ll be attending my niece’s wedding and will be picking it up, which is why I’m writing this now. Although I initially thought I would never be able to part with this very personal piece, the truth is that it’s time to let it go. I don’t want it anymore and am hoping that someone local might be interested in purchasing it. I’ll be putting the word out via social media, but if you’re reading this and would like more information, please feel free to contact me.

For hanging, cable was embedded in the cement during fabrication. The piece weighs over fifty pounds, and a couple of bolts screwed into the wall studs will safely support its weight. (I patched and painted the walls when I moved, and everything was left pristine.)

About the process:  Working in sculpture using the casting technique is a long and very involved process, and “Mother and Child” took two months to complete. Below are photos that were taken during several stages of work. Missing are steps 4 (submerging the entire cast in a cold bath overnight while the plaster cures), 5 (removing the clay and washing the cast),  7 (returning the cast to a cold bath while the cement fondue cures), 8 (carefully chipping the plaster cast off the cement fondue sculpture with a chisel and wooden mallet), 10 (applying a thinned enamel wash to the sculpture and buffing it), and finally 11 (lightly painting the sculpture with several different metallic spray paints to achieve a bronze look).

Step 1: Attach clay to a support, and rough out the sculpture design
Step 2: Continue building and refining the relief sculpture in clay
Step 2: Continue building and refining the relief sculpture in clay
Step 2: Continue building and refining the relief sculpture in clay
Step 2: Continue building and refining the relief sculpture in clay
Step 2: (Detail) Continue building and refining the relief sculpture in clay
Step 3: Cast the clay relief sculpture with plaster and burlap reinforcement.
Step 3: Cast the clay relief sculpture with plaster and burlap reinforcement.
Step 3: Finally, reinforce the cast with 2×2 inch wood braces.
Step 6: Begin to fill in the cast with a layer of cement fondue
Step 9: Clean the calcium residue from the plaster cast off the cement fondue with steel wool.
Step 9: Clean the calcium residue from the plaster cast off the cement fondue with steel wool. (At this point the sculpture looked interesting only partially cleaned._
Step 9: Finish cleaning the calcium residue from the plaster cast off the cement fondue with steel wool. (At this point the sculpture looked interesting with the figures not yet cleaned.
Completed “Mother and Child” with final bronze patina.
Detail from “Mother and Child” with bronze patina.
Detail from “Mother and Child” with bronze patina.