Dances with Fire

My favorite artist is the surrealist painter Salvador Dali.  Though, at a younger age, I rejected the work of Pablo Picasso, I later found some of his work wholly captivating.  I now consider his paintings among the greatest ever.  Both men were somewhat curious and boastful in life, but each of them seized upon an entirely new (if not twisted) form of expression in their works of art.   They made uncommon studies of common subjects.

I appreciate that.

Mind you, the speculative explanations and studies of their works leave me cold.  My view of art is more simplistic than that.   I like what I like and don’t like what I don’t like.  Back in the days of film photography, a friend and I used to click through my slides once they were developed and critique them with a very simple format.

“Pitch it,” (as in into the trash) we blurted within a second of seeing one that we did not like for reasons of poor color or poor composition.

“That sends me,” we would say of a photograph we liked.

I should mention…in later years we amended the saying “pitch it” to “pig shit.”  The slides we did not like were popped from the projector and flung across the room.

Boys will be boys.

The photographs I am posting today are, in a way, related to the work of Dali and Picasso.  They are unadorned studies of color and light.  I like photographs that play with color, or point-of-view, or anything else. I “painted” one photograph by swinging my camera over the embers of a campfire at my cabin.  The other photograph is that of a storm crossing the lake below my house at dusk.

 

 

--Mitchell Hegman