A Summertime Haunting
The Artist Challenge
It’s stormy here in Florida today, so a summertime haunting seems appropriate. I wanted to create images that had a storybook feel to them and hint at a larger narrative. Something ghostly and surreal.
The sailboat photograph above was taken after the chaos of Hurricane Irma last year. To create the composite, I dropped several filters over the image and blended it with a watercolor painting and recycled illustration.
In this image, a blend of two watercolor paintings make up the background. I attempted to collage a landscape that is interior and mysterious. The foreground is a photo of tall seagrass that has been dodged and burned. The deer is a recycled black and white photo, the heart is a found sketch, and the violet flowers are an appropriation of the popular Chinese red plum paintings. Bringing these images together, I was hoping to create a composite piece that’s both thoughtful and uncanny.
I’ve been going to the beach lately to look for marine invertebrates. The skeletons of sea urchins, living and dead, pockmark the shallow water. This image is a combination of an unfinished sketch I made of the urchins against the backdrop of a photo of pine trees and palmettos that I altered with the Photoshop “liquify” tool. The central image is a photograph of a marine annelid, which is a sea worm that looks like a flower. Urchins and worms make a lovely underwater garden, but can also be deceptively creepy.
Finally, this is a simple composite of two photos: a selfie I took at home one day and a pic of Florida mangroves from Sarasota Bay. I thought the composite had a bit of a haunted look and seems appropriate with the Florida theme — though certainly an image of a different genre than the storybook images. Now I will take a rainy day nap and dissolve into dreams of urchins and worms, shipwrecks and deers in love.
