Good question. Putting the visual into words can be as tricky as trying to put music into words. Lemme see.
Ben's performance was so huge in my estimation that I went looking for a Nick Krug picture of Ben that might capture it. Usually Nick captures that sort of thing himself. But I thought Ben's performance was so huge that none of Nick's photos really got to the essense at first. But then I went back and looked at this photo of Nick's and I could not help but notice that though he had not captured the magnitude of Ben's performance, he did capture the perfection of his shooting form. So: I decided to try to add the magnitude myself giving him a mountain backdrop that he had elevated into. I tried Mt. Everest for a back ground, but it just didn't add much. I tried several more ominously shaded mountain range shots for back drops. Some were good, but the words "its not monumental enough" came to me. The word monumental made me think of Mt. Rushmore. The Presidents faces of course define monumental. They look down on our endeavors from eternity. They are our American legacy given sculptural form. From the moment I decided to juxtapose a real foreground with an unreal background I knew I was moving into something that would be surreal. I have always loved the surrealism of scenes on the President's faces in Hitchcock's "North by Northwest." So I began to experiment with scale of the faces and I began to see a dominant line in the faces leading the eye upwards echoing the release of the ball. These are the kinds of echoing forms/lines that resonate with my eye, so I went with it. And I was able to position things so the ball itself rose even above the faces. From that point it was a matter of trying to re-orchestrate the colors some to try to get just enough shared colors to visually connect the surreal juxtaposition of foreground/background. The trick to certain great surrealism is to simultaneously let the mind know foreground and back ground are impossibly juxtaposed, yet use the shared colorations to bind the impossibilities together. This makes your sensory experience surreal. You just play with hues, lightness, and several other things until your eye sees both the formal impossibility and the coloration connecting both parts of the image and, voila, a surrealistic integrity. Thanks for visiting the gallery. Always great to hear from you.
Comments
plasticJHawk 3 months, 1 week ago
How did you get this idea? I really like this paintograph, it looks like a good poster print.
jaybate 3 months, 1 week ago
Good question. Putting the visual into words can be as tricky as trying to put music into words. Lemme see.
Ben's performance was so huge in my estimation that I went looking for a Nick Krug picture of Ben that might capture it. Usually Nick captures that sort of thing himself. But I thought Ben's performance was so huge that none of Nick's photos really got to the essense at first. But then I went back and looked at this photo of Nick's and I could not help but notice that though he had not captured the magnitude of Ben's performance, he did capture the perfection of his shooting form. So: I decided to try to add the magnitude myself giving him a mountain backdrop that he had elevated into. I tried Mt. Everest for a back ground, but it just didn't add much. I tried several more ominously shaded mountain range shots for back drops. Some were good, but the words "its not monumental enough" came to me. The word monumental made me think of Mt. Rushmore. The Presidents faces of course define monumental. They look down on our endeavors from eternity. They are our American legacy given sculptural form. From the moment I decided to juxtapose a real foreground with an unreal background I knew I was moving into something that would be surreal. I have always loved the surrealism of scenes on the President's faces in Hitchcock's "North by Northwest." So I began to experiment with scale of the faces and I began to see a dominant line in the faces leading the eye upwards echoing the release of the ball. These are the kinds of echoing forms/lines that resonate with my eye, so I went with it. And I was able to position things so the ball itself rose even above the faces. From that point it was a matter of trying to re-orchestrate the colors some to try to get just enough shared colors to visually connect the surreal juxtaposition of foreground/background. The trick to certain great surrealism is to simultaneously let the mind know foreground and back ground are impossibly juxtaposed, yet use the shared colorations to bind the impossibilities together. This makes your sensory experience surreal. You just play with hues, lightness, and several other things until your eye sees both the formal impossibility and the coloration connecting both parts of the image and, voila, a surrealistic integrity. Thanks for visiting the gallery. Always great to hear from you.
plasticJHawk 3 months, 1 week ago
I like that your explaination always supplements the imagery rather than just describing it.
AsadZ 3 months, 1 week ago
That's classic bate
jaybate 3 months, 1 week ago
Thx. It was fun to do.
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