the GRANDIOSE project - photography

Meant to be a “big” project to push myself as an artist, GRANDIOSE combines many of my interests into a unified undertaking. The project primarily employs photography, painting, and video in an exploration of the landscape. Eventually it will take me to every continent on the planet in search of significant mountain regions to explore. For GRANDIOSE, photography—particularly landscape photography— is about my immediate response to the location. Sometimes dynamic and evolving, sometimes quiet and still, the photographs record my immediate response to the landscape, and to the project itself. Back in the studio with some distance gained from the landscape, the photographs begin to change character. The direct experience of the individual moments captured as images fades, to be replaced by an overall amalgamation of all the moments of the experience—some captured on film, many not. In the studio the photography and the painting begin to interact as the photos inform the paintings while taking on a “life” of their own. They are culled, sorted, and processed into images meant to be seen for what they are, independent of the moment they were captured. The photos, the paintings, and the videos work together to express the whole of GRANDIOSE, a project bigger than any of the media I’m working with, but when combined, tell a story larger than any one of them could tell independently.