Artist Lecture: Brigham Dimick

I was really excited for Brigham Dimick's artist lecture since I had a studio visit with him right before and I was curious to see what his work looked like. Right from the start of his lecture, I was impressed with his work. The first couple of drawings that he showed were so complex and interesting to look at. I felt like I could really relate to his work, since he creates a lot of these spaces in his drawings from his own mind. At one point he talked about his artistic process and how before he starts to work on a piece, he thinks about what it means to be human. I found this very interesting and inspiring in a way. I also really liked how he had a lot of his large drawings unfinished in some corners. He spoke about how he was interested in opening the forms on the page and the idea of the unfinished sections being apart of the drawing. I really liked these drawings and how the very detailed sections of the drawing would just fade into nothing. There was also one drawing that he showed that really interested me because he combined real objects, bricks in this case, with the drawing. I found this to be very similar to what I am experimenting with right now. The one piece that he showed that I loved the most was the beehive cut outs of his head. Its really hard for me to explain it, or even understand how he did it, but I just loved the whole meaning behind the piece, since he was deathly allergic to bees. It was like he was trying to make peace with them. He also displayed these pieces in such a beautiful way, by lighting them from the back. Overall I really enjoyed this lecture since I found that I could relate to a lot of his work and his style of working. Here are some images of my favorite pieces by him.

Butterfly Lighting

Butterfly lighting is created by placing a light above the subject, about 25 to 75 degrees in line with the face of the subject. This type of lighting creates a "butterfly looking" shadow below the subjects nose. A reflector is often used below the subjects face, in order to soften the shadows. Here is an example of the lighting set up, from a birds eye perspective.

Here are a couple examples of some portraits that use Butterfly Lighting.

Still Life Project: Final Images

Mask Extraction in Photoshop Round 2

cats cats and more cats...

Sketches for Still Life Project

Skull

Still Life

Abstraction

I really enjoyed the two readings assigned to us about abstraction. I liked how the first reading, written by Andy Grundberg, talked about how photography is unable to really abstract anything since photographs shows a true realistic copy of what the camera saw. This article later stated that photography can only represent the idea of abstraction, rather than actually achieving abstraction. At first, I actually agree with what Grundberg was saying, but then later changed my mind when I read the second article online. In this article, it stated that all art is abstract since it is representing something tangible. I really liked that idea of all photographs being abstract in a way, since they are showing something tangible to the viewer, but still not showing the actually subject directly to the viewer.

These two abstract photographs, that I took this weekend, are able to show the viewer the object being photographed, while still leaving some of the image confusing. I chose these photographs because I really like how the different colors and shaded areas play with the viewers mind. The viewer might see a foot or a hand at first, but then start to see other images instead, that their mind starts to make up in the light and dark areas of the photograph.