One Thing Leads To Another

My photographic interests continue to lead me down the path of exploring multiple exposure, ICM (intentional camera movement), and expressionist photography. Lately, a good deal of that has taken place in a nearby art museum where I have been using in-camera blend modes and white balance changes to put together abstract portions of multiple paintings into one (after a few weeks of doing this, the docent questioned me and was quite interested in my explanation of what my friends and I were up to).

To be clear, you would not be able to identify any of the individual paintings I photographed because of the way the exposures are combined. In fact, I have even made art from letters printed on the museum wall by taking multiple exposures, changing the white balance between shots, and using the camera’s blend modes (but that’s a different subject and an image for another post). The result is much like a musical mash-up with multiple songs combined together with changes in tones etc., though the origins of the artwork are less visible to a viewer than the song components are to a listener.

For example, here is a piece I just completed last week. The fact that people see different things in these abstracts fascinates me. I see ghostly spirits flying around the forest at night. What do you see?

© Howard Grill

But photographing in the museum, along with my penchant for making images of very small area of very large murals that appear as if they could stand alone as artwork, led me to start to think about what is ‘fair’ to use as part of your own artwork. I mean in more of a ‘moral’ way than a legal way. And also in a way that is beyond what I was doing. For example, if you are photographing architecture (and architecture is, of course, a form of art), is that fair? After all, you are photographing someone else’s artwork. Even if you are photographing a 500-year-old doorway, you didn’t build that piece of work. A different artisan did. This can obviously be carried to an extreme, and I feel very comfortable with the abstract work that I am doing at the museum (as well as with my penchant for photographing small areas of murals). But it did lead me down the thought path of ‘what if’? What if I created some of my own artwork to then combine into multiple exposures in Photoshop (or in-camera)?

So, I was looking for a way to create abstract ‘hunks’ to combine together and see how that might end up looking. And that is how I discovered Gelli plate printing. A Gelli plate is a small, soft, flexible surface onto which you can roll out acrylic paints, inks, and other media. Before it dries, you place a sheet of paper on top of the plate, press down for about 15 seconds, and then peel the paper off the plate. When doing so, the acrylic paint gets transferred to the paper. You can then let the paint dry and consider it done, or you can add additional layers of paint on top of the first layer, letting the paint dry between layers.

I decided to give it a try and photograph the results before combining them into a final piece in Photoshop. Here are examples of some of my first Gelli print results. These are the papers as they came off the plate, not combined into a multiple exposure in Photoshop.

© Howard Grill

© Howard Grill

© Howard Grill

When I start trying to combine them in Photoshop, I will definitely write another post showing what I was able to get from the ‘mash-ups’. In the meantime, simply making the Gelli prints is an enjoyable process. I will see where this all takes me.

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