light/shadow, bold/subtle, hot/cold, yin and yang, order versus chaos. Contrary forces that can complement each other or be locked in a struggle. Within a work of art that struggle can create bold movement and interest. Within an artist it can yield completely different groups of work and eternal, internal conflict.
Since my earliest days of art practice I have been attracted to hard lines and their interrelationships. In high school and before, I would create small, graphic paintings using lines and letters. Perhaps it was a natural predilection for order that drove that vision or maybe, it was the other way around. Years of doing commercial photography only strengthened the ethic of tight compositions with everything in its place. No converging parallels allowed there!
With street photography my nature wants to control the frame and I have to make a conscious effort not to. I have to work fast and instinctively to avoid “lining everything up” and obsessing over the relationship of objects in the frame to the edges of the frame. Develop a seemingly random approach to avoid being precise.
Are there other opposites artists work to overcome…a tendency they possess that they must consciously work to keep in control? Should they? Can an artist produce multiple bodies of work of different discipline without corrupting their identifiable style?
TOP: 501 Datura Street, West Palm Beach 2011
ABOVE: Crossing Paths, Blue Ridge, Georgia 2011
posted by Greg Allikas, October 5, 2011