Art almost always involves the manipulation of media.
Sculptors carve marble, poets work with words, painters apply paint to surfaces.
The principle holds true with every new technology. The art of the film maker lies in the uses s/he puts to the cinematic processes and materials. And photographers?
At first the sheer wonder of images appearing on glass was enough, but soon photographers began to produce work which deliberately made use of developing techniques, plates and papers, to artistic ends. And with each technical development, there are artists who take advantage of it to extend their art.
Alan Cross is one such artist. His work is currently being shown in the Worthing Artists Open Houses exhibition.
Alan is an accomplished photographer in what one might call a conventional sense. Subjects are pictured with a clarity and intensity which makes an immediate impact on the viewer.
But he has also produced a body of work which goes beyond this and towards abstraction.
Camera lenses excel at revealing what the human eye cannot register. Consider the early days of colour photography when white shirts appeared yellow under tungsten lighting. The camera was faithfully reproducing what we actually see, not what we think we see. Today, high definition digital cameras reveal those colours we fail to see. We discover that there are (often unexpected) colours inherent in subjects which we thought we knew. Perhaps we do ‘see’ them intuitively, but that is for psychologists to explore.
Of course, this is not new. The French Impressionist painters showed us that shadows were not grey or black and, once shown, we knew it had been true all along.
Alan takes photographic images and draws from them those colours and gradations of colours we would otherwise not see. He then subjects them to digital processes which distort the image, bringing out shapes and patterns or perhaps creating new ones. The result is aesthetically pleasing and more besides.
It would be sad if viewers’ responses to this work were that it is simply ‘clever’ or even ‘decorative’.
So how might we allow, say, the image above to engage with us as art? First, we might ask ourselves what it is a picture ‘of’. I imagine that many people would say ‘water’ or ‘mountains and valleys’. But we cannot be quite sure, especially if we know how this artist works. There is an ongoing discussion to be had here in our minds. Second, we might consider the contrasts of light and shade, the distribution of colours and tones. How do they affect the whole image? Do we see balance? Or disharmony? How do we read the whole composition?
Eventually, we should come to the golden question: what does it mean? Irritatingly for some artists, it’s no good asking them. Once they release an artwork, they lose their rights over its meaning. The question is strictly: ‘what does it mean for me?’
This is an intensely personal question, but we profit from trying to articulate an answer. Alan’s abstract work has that potential to make us reflect, and perhaps to flourish.