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Painting With Light
| Article
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20449 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
1,549 Words |
| Author
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Darwin Marable
Darwin Marable is a photo historian, writer, lecturer, and
independent curator based in the San Francisco Bay area. |
Photography, which literally means drawing with light, became an aid to artists beginning with Eugene Delacroix and continuing with Charles Sheeler, Andy Warhol, and David Hockney, among numerous others. Artists increasingly are finding novel uses for the photograph. Details that were formerly sketched are now quickly frozen by the camera lens. Some artists compete with the photographic image, while others actually incorporate photographs into their paintings.
During the last ten to fifteen years the interfacing of photography and painting has become pronounced. One unique Los Angeles artist, Jay Dunitz, literally creates images by painting with light, friction, heat, and electricity and then photographs them.
Dunitz first studied painting and drawing at the Kansas City Art Institute before transferring to Hampshire College because of its more experimental approach to education. However, it was later, as a painting student at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he received his B.F.A. degree in 1978, that Dunitz turned to the 4-by-5-view camera to photograph nature. His future direction was suggested when he photographed a rusty refrigerator in a neighbor's yard and discovered the painterly qualities of deteriorating metal surfaces. Dunitz learned that the camera lens can create abstractions through close-ups and the isolation of fragments of reality. Junk, found objects, and constructions are all photographic material for his colorful imagery.
Dunitz began his Kroeber Series in 1980 while living in Berkeley, where he found pieces of metal the sculpture students had discarded on the University of California campus. He was attracted to the unusual shapes and the interesting effects light and the elements had upon the metal. Dunitz collected the scraps over a four-year period, arranged them in various compositions, and photographed them in the sunlight with a 2 1/4 Hasselblad and close-up optics. "I shot them as quickly as I could, because they changed color quickly, due to the sunlight and all that happened outside," says Dunitz. "If it rained one evening, I'd come back the next day and everything looked completely different."
The metal also changed color where it had been overheated by the students' welding torches, resulting in striking hues of red, yellow, and blue. Also, both oxidation and decay modified the appearance of the metal. Dunitz then realized the potential of using the rich color changes as a palette.
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