Out of all this fellow’s color images, I picked three B and Ws. What does that mean? Am I getting desensitized to the fluorescent brightness of Twenty-First Century digital imagery? Is it me? Or do these three pics just pop with style?
Okay, I’m calm now. It’s the latter. Whew! And here I was getting worried.
Oh, boy, this guy’s work makes me feel like a kid in a psychedelic candy store. Awesome. Made my day.
These pics have a weird kind of gravity about them, as if I can’t help being pulled into their orbit. I wonder if I’d look at them differently in the Southern hemisphere.
Here are those happy bunny photos I was promising you. The one with Rupert in the flowers with-. What? Oh, sorry wrong pictures.
At first, I wasn’t buying Ellen Rogers’s faux retro. Now I’m pretty much sunk by it. There is no digital manipulation of her film images, other than scanning. This is all lens, filter and darkroom technique. And yeah, after getting over the hump of the semi-nude images (oh, shut up), I’m completely in enthralled by her romanticism.
I don’t know what makes certain artists paint the same subject over and over again. But with this guy, I don’t question, I just enjoy. If you’re going to pick something worth exploring over a period of years, calavera (skulls) are definitely the way to go.
I’m pretty picky about the old photo desctructo artists I like. There are a truckload of tintype-trashing posers out there thinking they’re adding to the world of valuable images instead of subtracting from it. But this, guy, Mr. Hollis Brown Thornton is the real deal. He paints or marks up images sometimes to the point where there is barely anything recognizable from the original. That kind of reckless abandon is the sure sign of noble intentions, as far as I’m concerned. Love it.
