Perception Printing

Introduction to the visual poetry of the everyday

In a poem, rhyme is the repetition of similar sounds, similar but not necessarily exactly the same. Where might I find a rhyme in an image? As I walk the streets of the town where I live the red of a rose might be said to rhyme with the shiny red bonnet of a car — in that they are both similarly red but otherwise quite different, they carry, embody redness… and, the shape of a tree might rhyme with the shape of a cloud, the angular lines of palm fronds might rhyme with a tumult of rusted iron fence, the repetition of vertical tree trunks might rhyme with tall standing electric light poles, the texture of a concrete wall might rhyme with the roughness of a conifer.

Concentrate on an aspect of something, a colour, a shape, lines, repetition, texture and find it somewhere else.

In any given poem there may be many rhyming words, appearing and read at distinct intervals. The eye unpacks an image — drawn to various elements in an image. Perhaps it is pleasing, just like in the poem, to find a companion — a visual rhyme — to a red rose in the gleaming red paint job on a car; angular palm fronds and angular fence; rough wall, rough conifer; a shape and another shape.

Transgressing the factual

I am interested in the visual relationship between the built environment and nature. I have found that there are similarities — visual rhyming — between the two. If a rusted fence strikes the eye in a similar way to the fronds of a palm because of their similar angular shape, two elements of my landscape — as I walk around the town I live — can now be grouped together, likenesses be found. And in this way, extending this way of looking to other elements of my landscape and using visual rhyming as a way of organising these elements within my images, I transgress from a more factual way of seeing, not seeing much detail at all — into revealing and drawing attention to patterns that are ‘camouflaged by the normal’.

I am looking for my own definition of beauty in the everyday and hope that my work extends the general definition of what is beautiful.

I find, when things rhyme visually, this promotes a feeling of harmony with the environment built, natural or both and my own inner peace. My own inner creative world drives my work and I am on a personal and unique journey with my art.

Using imagination in real space

A picture of a house can be many things, mostly it shows the house for its function and for what it is worth in the real world to someone taking the photograph. They find the best angle to show off the new deck, make sure the house itself is completely shown, create a picture that gives a sense of the story of the house, including its size and what type of house it is. It is as if you are looking through a window, or the very eyes of this person and you could just walk right in. When I am walking around the town I live, I am scoping out everything I see in a different way, measuring its worth using some of the most basic elements of visual art production, like shape, line, colour, texture, repetition, symmetry and more.

In this way I use my imagination in real space to capture images of those things that draw my eye and things that excite me on this level.

I notice the visual rhyming, I see that a cloud is singing to a tree and a tree is contradicting a fence line and in the middle there is a flower saying look at me. I am more interested in fitting these salient features into an image — where the flower gets to be the centre of attention and the cloud and the tree are presented as I imagine them, than representing the street by framing a window onto a typical part of that street.

“Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition” — Eli Khamarov

• My source material and main activity is digital photography.
• My main focus for these photographs is composition. So — the simpler, more portable the camera the better — if it feels like I am using no camera at all, all the better.
• My tools for composition are zoom, orientation of the frame of the picture (portrait, landscape or on an angle for objects that don’t orientate strongly with the pull of gravity — like flowers) and of course what position I take the photograph from (where I am, what position my body is in).
• My digital work adapted from my photographs is imaginative, psychedelic, elegant and ethereal.
• My work is also very much about memory: I might, for example, use an image of a lamp to illicit associations with the sun.
• As I work more with the image/s I am moving further away from that factual no details way of seeing the world, into a more and more abstract and personal vision.

Switching on to renewal of perception

Familiar surroundings can switch you off.

As you walk to the same grey building you work in each week day and get the same view of that grey building you might actually stop seeing that building anymore. You might not notice that on certain days its grey walls match the sky, or as you get closer to those walls they reveal a solemn presence, and have a certain stolidness compared to the red petunias you can see the reflection of in the corner of one of the glass sliding doors at the main entrance.

In my library of images, I start my digital work by combining two photographs and they may be quite different. I continue to use digital art making tools like masks, opacity, filters, saturation, contrast, cropping, layers and more to create problems, contradictions, and striking similarities between nature and the built environment, as it appears to me.

I am cheating familiarity and pushing myself head first into a different way of seeing.

In the end, using nothing but what I have seen or felt about what I have seen I have made contact with an altered state, now preserved in an image.

Bringing it home

In this way I compose still (.jpeg) and moving images (.gif). The still images are printed onto wood to hang in homes. My photographs I get printed on art paper. I currently always have work like this hanging at MET galleries. I hope to share my vision and my interests with the people who view my art.

Wearing the world

“To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.” — Wendell Berry

Furthering even those images using more digital tools like reframing, blocking repetitions, cropping, opacity, filters, I create highly decorative fabric print designs. As my work on these images continues only the strongest visual elements survive and blocking repetitions in various ways synthesises complex patterns. Using the latest inkjet dye printing techniques and digital to screenprinting available to me via companies on the web I am able to bring the essence of what I have seen at the very beginning in digital photographs to decorative all over printed fabrics and screen prints that can be worn and cherished. View here and here.

This is my story from perception to printing.

Diagram: Work Schema

(c) Sam Blanch, 2015.