Reflections
I've been creating photographic art since 1986, and exhibiting my work since 1992. Lately I've been concentrating on large-scale works in colour. A number of preoccupations have guided my work:
- I believe a serious artist should provide publicly useful revelation rather than privately gratifying confession.
- Moving images demand involvement in the fleeting moment; photographic images invite meditation over time (cf Susan Sontag’s “Life is a movie, death is a photograph.”). As such, photography appeals to the sensual priest-spiritual historian who make up my animus.
- I'm dismayed at how indifferently and inappropriately most works are framed. I believe how a work is framed is integral to its effect.
- Since photography is not yet generally recognized as art by the public-at-large, I try to reinforce its status as art when conceiving my frames. For example, given that the public associates canvas with art, I mounted the images of my Étapes/Stages exhibition on canvases. It's also why the images of Watervisions go to the edge of the frame rather than be set off by a matte, and why I'm preparing a series of photographic works presented in old gilt frames originally made for paintings.
- Though I’ve taken some "classic" photographs — images that immediately resonate and rest in memory for virtually anyone of moderate visual sophistication in Western culture — creating such images is a rarity. However, I believe — along with Warhol, the Starn Brothers et al — that it's possible to present and combine non-classic images in ways that create major art.
- I'm fascinated that a single negative, via changes in colours, tints, densities and sizing that can be produced on a computer or in the darkroom, may yield a variety of prints, each evoking a different emotional response. Hence I often use various takes from the same negative in creating my art, an approach that no doubt reflects my experience as a filmmaker. Monet, Rothko and Rembrandt have also influenced my thinking.
- Above all, I care about the emotional/spiritual impact of a work of art. Form, including framing, must serve content to provide this impact. I’m not interested in exploring form for form’s sake. It was in order to reinforce the spiritual impact of my work that I used triptych forms for Étapes/Stages; and presented Watervisions in icon boxes.
- I wish to create innovative works of lasting beauty which will move people while ministering to their often inchoate or unexpressed needs and desires. The necessary task of creating art that reflects the ugliness, brutality and inequality in life and which calls out for protest and change, I leave to others. Rather than reinforce people’s despair or deepen their dismay and dissatisfaction, I wish, through my art, to celebrate life and reinforce people’s desire to go on living.
Montréal, August 2005