Helen Glazer, Artist - - Artist's Statement: Cloud Photographs and Hand-colored Prints

Clouds: Hand-Colored Photographs & Sculpture
Artist's Statement

If we notice clouds at all, we’re probably just checking the weather. But I’ve been taking a closer look. Clouds are ephemeral, transforming and decaying as they move across the sky. When I stop the action with a digital camera and increase the tonal range with Adobe Photoshop, clouds reveal themselves as intricately textured three-dimensional forms arising from complex rhythms of flowing currents of air. They gesture and take on a poetic resonance. They morph into unexpected, almost otherworldly forms that would be difficult to invent -- the human brain works too schematically for that. As the saying goes, "You can't make this stuff up."

These works have been influenced by ideas from chaos theory and complexity theory that look at natural phenomena as diverse as the shape of coastlines, the growth of tree limbs or the movement of fluids, and finds that while such systems proceed according to general rules, they are never entirely predictable owing to a myriad of subtle interactions. I'm particularly interested in the characteristic movements found in all flowing media: for example, rhythmic waves, vortices, spiraling movements and meandering curves. These currents of movement can be said to have surfaces and three-dimensional form, even if those forms are too fleeting to be closely observed before they change, for example the surface of moving water, or a spiraling curl of rising smoke. Advances in science have heightened our awareness of constant change, that stability is an illusion, and that the reality we live in is being replaced moment by moment. I've come to see the artistic process as analogous to the dynamical systems posited by chaos and complexity theories -- that is, an artwork takes shape within particular conditions of time, place, medium and the artist's own hand and sensibility, and unfolds as these forces interact.

Shown here are archival pigment photographic prints hand-colored with pastels or acrylic paint. I begin with a digital photograph. While sometimes background details are deleted or smoothed out, and colors and tones may be intensified or deepened, the actual shapes, textures and forms found in nature are not augmented with invented forms, nor are they combined with other images. The resulting images reveal nuances that the camera captures, but the naked eye fails to see, and conventional image processing does not show. After they are printed, I add the hand coloring to emphasize the rhythms and movements through space. The largest pieces shown here were printed at 40 inches in their longest dimension, which projects the viewer into this recognizable, yet strange, environment.

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