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IC w8 inspiration

  • HildeMaassen
  • Mar 19, 2020
  • 12 min read

Updated: Aug 15, 2020

Still struggling to organize my ideas, I am revisiting, looking up, shortening, extracting from texts in a chaos era called Carona. The school where I teach is closed, we will continue online and how? Everyone can find out for themselves. Fortunately not a big problem for me, but it does mean more work. What you normally do orally must now be placed on paper and that is intensive.


The clouds are now beautiful as if they are doing their best to make something of it. I'm amazed at the amount of planes that come over. I tought that it was just about stopped; not so it seems.

Or is it the sam as we read about China? In the tabel here you see that Vovid-19 is good for the NO2 levels in China:






When working on researching others, I pay particular attention to similarities and differences. This can be technical, conceptual and visual.


Having a hard time concentrating, I'm going to work in a structured way, hoping it will help me get started.



Saskia Boelsums. Landscape #51

1. Saskia Boelsums;


Similarities: "As a Dutch visual artist and photographer, I carry a rich cultural heritage with me. That is why I feel a strong connection to the Dutch tradition of landscape painters. That rich history helped shape me. And at the same time, it confronts me with the future. In the beauty that I try to capture in my photographs, there is also uncertainty and something threatening. I see the skies becoming more dramatic, the weather is becoming more extreme with unexpected phenomena, our climate is becoming more violent. It looks like the classic historic Dutch landscapes and skies are being pushed out by landscapes and skies that are the result of climate change. I am very aware of that tension. That is what I capture".


Differences: visually very narrative, storytelling


Technical: Saskia Boelsums’ work is often reminiscent of landscape paintings by old masters, but that is not the goal according to her. “I immersed myself into the old masters’ lighting and style when I started doing still lifes. That is where you can see a clear influence from classical paintings, but with my landscapes, I do not feel the urge to copy Ruysdael for instance.” She uses post production.


Conceptual; Landscape photography really enables Saskia Boelsums to express herselves, because: “I love silence. In this way landscapes are a reflection of myself. Rest, silence and a bit of loneliness. “She prefers to tell stories through pictures rather than words:” Telling someone about what you saw reduces the experience.


Visual; Reproduction of what she sees

Inspiration; Moved to the countryside Everywhere around me I discovered the beauty of nature, the details, the changes, the lighting. The environment became work area and inspiration.


Presentation: Boelsums made a conscious decision to use a square format to capture her landscapes. “I find it a fascinating format. I thought it was a challenge to capture something so expensive in a square format. And square is really modern, think of Instagram for instance.”



Seb Janiak. The Kingdom Catchers of Heaven - 2010

2. Seb Janiak


Similarities: clouds, building, techincal approach, reshape the world, manifestation of invisible forces

"his fictional world organized under our eyes at our discretion, with the remnants of the real world, reveals the most specific essence of a soul".


Differences; concept


Technical: innovations open up the possibility of new types of image. Since 2011, he has set new parameters on this research by restricting himself to the techniques of analog photography, namely double exposure, superimposition and photomontage. This consummate master of digital editing abandoned what people were all too ready to consider his main forte. This limited range of options has proved fruitful, leading him to perfect increasingly complex systems in the studio to produce photographs of magnetic fields using ferrofluids, laser beams, sunlight (Visible light), or even air bubbles (Vacuity). In this way, he re-establishes the link with the photographic tradition in its earliest incarnation, when the skill of the artist was crucial and the key challenge was to capture light in permanent form.


Conceptual; spurred on by a Whether he is dealing with institutionalized phenomena (religion, science, and astrophysics in particular) or niche areas (esotericism, ufology) his imagination draws on humanity in all its boundless diversity, transcending time and place.

In what can be viewed as a yearning for simplicity or even a form of asceticism, Seb Janiak continues to translate his thoughts on man’s fate, the world and its mysterious forces, time and light into images. He devotes equal attention to analyzing all of these evolving phenomena which are a permanent feature of his work, echoing their ceaseless patterns of renewal in his own creative approach.


“matter is only an illusion,” then its images, in counterpoint, are an illusion of matter; but matter from which the creative artist has nevertheless removed a small corner of the veil. The risk of stagnation is compensated by an escape without a possible return"


Inspiration; restless desire to observe the world, challenge it and apply his artistic skills to reshaping it. He has an unquenchable thirst for everything that supplements our understanding of reality, opens up new perspectives and creates meaning.



It is primarily a strange dialogue. We experience varying degrees of feelings of opening and narrowing that are close to pure sensation.


Only after he had started the series ‘Kingdom et Photon’ did this approach, focused on the unseen, completely penetrate the mind of the artist. Beneath the chaotic appearance is a special art that is derived from the roots of matter and chemistry. The completed work surpasses all archaeological treatises and molecular micro photography. It produces the true fullness of what is invisible. It bears witness to new demands that are never separated from forgotten fundamentals. In the action of photography and in the immediacy of the present moment, Seb Janiak sets in motion a trembling quake in which life seems to take on a kind of absolute quality. Our artist may argue with regret that: “My work simply uses the manifestation of invisible forces - photography is unable to see what is invisible as physicists can”; in his ‘Photon’ series, the prints drew signals from the depths of both the microcosmic and, paradoxically, the astronomical realms. Everything comes back together: life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the top and bottom, the transferable and the non-communicable.


Sources

Zuijderwijk en Vergouwe - Mapping. 2019


3. Zuijderwijk en Vergouwe


Similarities mapping, abstract, lines, nature, detail and texture, the human preference for structuring, organizing and understanding the landscape. Dutch.


Differences without the use of image manipulation, projection


Technical Lines have been projected onto rock formations with a laser pen. The abstract black and white scans that form the projection visualize some of the infinite possibilities to experience the landscape. All images were made on location and without the use of image manipulation.


Conceptual Central to their work is the relationship between man and nature, as artists they are interested in the diversity that nature can offer. Their recent work shows an interest in human intervention in nature ”.Because of the fascination with the human conception of nature, Zuijderwijk and Vergouwe constantly search for subjects that meet these two aspects and merge into a rewarding end result without prejudice. In addition to subjectivism, They study the human preference for structuring, organizing and understanding the landscape. Iit’s also about different perspectives and subjectivity.


Visual In these latest photos, surprising effects are achieved by using light and movement in combination with slow exposure. The artificiality of the light creates beams and playful patterns against what appears to be an eternal landscape. The resulting photos are unfiltered and unedited. The viewer’s attention is drawn to elements such as verticality, mystery and a fairytale signature.


Sources


Dibbets, Jan. 1979. Vondelpark.

Jan Dibbets


Similarities


  • Research

  • Photography as starting point but then alternated, edited

  • Non-linguistic thinking; think in images

  • The observable image

  • The shape

  • The spatial illusion

  • Abstract

  • Dutch


Differences time (1960), perspective,


Technical The question what is photography, what is a camera. What does the camera do, what does the photographer think,(the camera doesn't think) How does the photographer influences what the camera does. All conversations with the camera. You cannot ignore the light; it is typical of photography.


Conceptual; Examine the assumptions of what we see through photography. Dibbets is concerned with the concept of what perception is. He plays with spatial illusions and perspective. This raises the question of what photography does and what the viewer sees when he sees an image.


"Art is a sublimate of an expression. Someone trying to make something doesn't know what he's making. That is the ensemble with which you have reached a limit that you cannot overlook. I cannot imagine what I make for someone else. I can't imagine what I'm making

If it is not an experiment then it is a product. The soul of art requires to try it out"


Photography is not figurative at all and not abstract, it is a hybrid based on mutual agreements.


Visual He combines photographically with painting and cuts photos into pieces to create new shapes and illusion. Isolate part of photo, give different background, manipulate image, windows that let light through, representative of the eye of the camera. Background chases the eye. You see something that is not true, but that you believe to be true.


Sources

https://www.artsalonholland.nl/grote-meesters-kunstgeschiedenis/jan-dibbets


Richard Misrach. Left: Clouds, July 29, 2018, 8:12pm, CA, 2018. Right: Clouds, June 5, 2014, 11:51am, France, 2014


Richard Misrach


Similarities Clouds, abstract


Differences Deeply Romantic


Technical iPhone studies


Conceptual the world viewed not as asgap, but as a shifting matrix of light and color.

An intensely observed nature metamorphoses into a highly personal abstraction.


Visual The new photographs are simply images of cloud-filled skies. Breathtakingly beautiful are the ice blue and faint pink light of morning in the desert, as refined as a fete galante by Watteau; the suffocating orange of high noon and, as day turns into night, a curtain of the darkest black descending upon the last, riotous gasp of orange, pink, blue, white and yellow.

Deeply Romantic. They honor the intractable sublimity of nature. Misrach’s work celebrates the beauty of the real, of that which is there. They proclaim that photography no longer needs any justification beyond this, Unlike Slieglitz.


Inspiration

Alfred Stieglitz’s “Equivalents.” In the 1920s, The clouds’ dark blacks, silvery grays and glowing whites were carefully juxtaposed to become “equivalents” for human emotions: fear, hope, despair, elation. Misrach tellingly subtitles his current series “Non-Equivalents.” He means to frustrate the metaphorical dimension of the photographic image, which Stieglitz courted so assiduously.



Michiel Van Bakel: Zonnestraal Re-Sculpted, full color 3D print, 2019,

Van Bakel: Onderland (teaser above) - 4K interactive video installation triggered by sonar sensor, 2019


Michiel van BAKEL


Similarities


  • Unseen

  • Technical approach

  • 3D technics

  • Geological processes

  • Invisible world

  • Layers

  • Manipulation

  • Time

  • Nature phenomeen


Differences often moving, interactive, sculpture


Technical: technical approach. Van Bakel combines the basic basis of photography and video with digital animation techniques. Pinhole, Scanning, interactive video. Van Bakel’s interactive video is a combination of pinhole scanner camera images with point clouds. These are alienating shots, allowing the viewer to experience the natural landscape in a different way.


Conceptual: his work focuses on people in their environment, often resulting in a poetic reality.

The idea to express this normally invisible world below the surface in a visual way. The slowness of natural growth and geological processes is depicted and contrasts with the tremendous speed of the man-made digital information sphere.


Visual: interactive video: Van Bakel came up with the idea to express this normally invisible world below the surface in a visual way. The slowness of natural growth and geological processes is depicted and contrasts with the tremendous speed of the man-made digital information sphere. From above-ground forest and swamp, through iron-colored groundwater and root systems - to the deeper layers of the earth. In this way, the viewer gets a new experience of a hidden landscape in interaction with the image.


Inspiration Sources of inspiration beginning of the moving image, slightly after the development of the steam engine, moment between recorded movement; the invisible, disappearance of utopias; from something simple to layers to an architectural object. The starting point for this interactive video project stems from the work of eco-hydrologist Jon Mensink. Every day, he and his environmental consultancy investigate all kinds of “invisible things” beneath the surface of the earth. The enormous amounts of data this produces are normally not visible, but essential to be able to develop everything on the earth’s surface; from architecture to environmental management.



Edward Burtynsky, "Ölfusá River #1," (detail) Iceland, 2012.

Edward burtynsky



Similarities;


  • Nature,

  • Geological time,

  • Landscape transformed by man,

  • Surreal landscapes

  • abstract


Differences


  • Stichted photos


Technical

  • Big prints

  • Stitched high-resolution shots


Conceptual; He documents landscapes that, whether you find them beautiful or monstrous, or as a strange combination of the two, are clearly no prospect of an inexhaustible, sustainable world. The images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.


Visual Inspired by nature sense of geological time as a referencepoint. First there is a certain attraction but how to arise aversion? "The project water takes us across protruding landscapes, delta areas with fractal patterns, ominously colored biomorphic shapes, rigid and rectilinear stairwells, huge circular pivot irrigation plots, aquaculture and social, cultural and ritual gatherings. Water is introduced intermittently as a victim, a partner, a protagonist, a lure, a source, an end, a threat and a pleasure.Water is also often completely absent in the photographs.Burtynsky instead focuses on the visual and physical effects of the lack of water, making his absence even more presence becomes more powerful.



Other sources to investigate



https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/237747


9 quotes for maps

  1. “Maps encourage boldness. They’re like cryptic love letters. They make anything seem possible.” ― Mark Jenkins

  2. “Geographers never get lost. They just do accidental field work.” ― Nicholas Chrisman

  3. “I’ve always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going — in a sense it’s three tenses in one.” ― Peter Greenaway

  4. “Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.” — Terry Pratchett

  5. “Maps are like campfires — everyone gathers around them, because they allow people to understand complex issues at a glance, and find agreement about how to help the land.” ― Sonoma Ecology Center, GIS/IS Program Web Site

  6. “Our earth is a globe Shose surface we probe no map can replace her but just try to trace her” ― Steve Waterman

  7. “Without geography, you’re nowhere!” ― Jimmy Buffett

  8. “There’s no blank spots on the map anymore, anywhere on earth. If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind.” ― Jon Krakauer

  9. “A map is the greatest of all epic poems. Its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.” ― Gilbert H. Grosvenor


9 Quotes on photography that resonates with my work

  1. All that photography’s program of realism actually implies is the belief that reality is hidden. And, being hidden, is something to be unveiled. (Sontag, 94)

  2. “You mean to say, the Mistake-Thyself,” said Kafka, with a faint smile. I protested: “What do you mean? The camera cannot lie!” “Who told you that?” Kafka leaned his head toward his shoulder. “Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’T catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling…. This automatic camera doesn’t multiply men’s eyes but only gives a fantastically simplified fly’s eye view.” —from Gustav Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka (Sontag p171)

  3. Such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)—a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be. (Sontag, p 120)

  4. Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is availableto record what is disappearing. (Sontag p20)

  5. The photograph offers a modern counterpart of that characteristically romantic architectural genre, the artificial ruin: the ruin which is created in order to deepen the historical character of a landscape, to make nature suggestive—suggestive of the past. The contingency of photographs confirms that everything is perishable; the arbitrariness of photographic evidence indicates that reality is fundamentally unclassifiable. Reality is summed up in an array of casual fragments—an endlessly alluring, poignantly reductive way of dealing with the world. Illustrating that partly jubilant, partly condescending relation to reality that is the rallying point of Surrealism, the photographer’s insistence that everything is real also implies that the real is not enough. By proclaiming a fundamental discontent with reality, Surrealism bespeaks a posture of alienation which has now become a general attitude in those parts of the world which are politically powerful, industrialized, and camera-wielding (Sontag p62, 63)

  6. Beauty is nature’s way of acting at a distance. (denis Dutton) “A Darwinian theory of beauty”. TED conference, www.ted.com. February 2010.

  7. You don’t take a photograph, you make it. Ansel Adams

  8. A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into Ansel Adams

  9. To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things. Ansel Adams


SOURCES


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© 2019 by Hilde Maassen 

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