NEW ART FROM HEAT
Some art is doubly full of heat, a combination of subject matter and form. Add to that the passion of the artist, and you really feel the fire. We’ve explored a variety of new art, formed by multiple flames.
“Flame,” by Pete Eckert, evokes special kind of intense heat. Not only because of its passionate subjects, but because it evokes an extraordinary fire burning with Eckert.
Eckert is a blind photographer. Trained in sculpture and industrial design, he had planned on studying architecture at Yale when he learned, in his early twenties, that he would become 100% blind within two years, as a result of Retinitis Pigmentosa. He pivoted and went on to earn an MBA so that he might find another way of making a living.
He first explored photography AFTER he lost his sight, when he discovered an old 1950’s camera while cleaning out his mother-in-law’s drawer. “I found the camera fascinating and discovered it had an infrared setting,” Eckert explains. “I thought a blind guy doing photos in a non-visible wavelength would be amusing. I was hooked. I knew nothing about film or manual cameras.”
Eckert shoots in a completely dark room, using flashlights and strobes as “brushes,” painting with light, capturing what he sees in his mind’s eyes, a combination of memory and crackling lighting that still moves across his retinas.
Watch Eckert tell his story in Avant/Garde Diaries' short documentary.
“I am not bound by the assumptions of the sighted or their assumed limits.” His drawings, interestingly, look like his photographs. While sighted people don’t help him make the art, they offer him feedback before his final large prints are produced. “It is a good bridge between the blind and sighted.” he says. “Talking with people in galleries builds a bridge between my mind’s eye and their vision of my work.” Occasionally people refuse to believe he is blind. “I am a visual person. I just can’t see.”
Darren Pearson uses a torch, like a hot paintbrush swishing through cold darkness, to make light graffiti as his camera takes a long exposure. Each image takes two to five minutes to create. One series, recently featured at Natural History Museum of Los Angeles 100th anniversary celebration, uses the light to paint skeletons of real, extinct, and imagined creatures.
Photo: Darren Pearson, “Bioluminesce”
Pearson operates a bit in stealth mode, like Banksy in a way, by moving through cover of darkness, mostly through the city of LA, finding locations for his shoots that will give him the perfect amount of darkness in the backdrop.
Check out Pearson’s site, DariusTwin, to see more of his light paintings as well as his incredible t-shirt designs, some designed for True Religion.
Check out the short interview, images, and videos: Darren Pearson Light Painting at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles 100th Anniversary from Light Painting Photography on Vimeo. And see his flickr page here.
Dale Chihuly sculpts with silica and heat. His monumental glass works are a testament to his mastery of both. The forms Chihuly favors embody their primal heat, often looking molten, even once cooled. One of his most iconic series of works are suns, like the one that headlines his latest, on exhibition, at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, “Utterly Breathtaking,” which runs until October 2, 2013.
Photo: Courtesy of Breathtaking
See Chihuly’s heat artistry as he takes you through part of his process in these videos:
Chihuly Hotshop Part 1 (Youtube)
Chihuly Hotshop Part 2 (Youtube)
Chihuly Hotshop Part 3 (Youtube)
A different heat comes through photographer Adam Robertson’s photos. This photo, shot on a sunbaked beach, gains heat from its sensuousness, as do many of Robertson’s works. Even more is added by the relationship between his subjects and him.
“I find that it is much more of a record of the relationship formed over the day,” Robertson explains in an interview with 4ormat's Explore. Create. Repeat. “I like to people watch and create stories about them and what they’re doing right there at that moment in time.”
Robertson believes that his ability to candidly capture the warmth of relationship makes him, “Much more able to capture their beauty.”
There is beauty in heat, created both by the universe and the artists that live within it, happening right now. Check out the rest of our posts on heat this week in Arts/Design, Food/Drink, Mind/Body, Place/Time, Nature/Science, and Soul Impact. And enter our photo competition this week. The theme: Heat (Deadline, July 14th, 2013).
