... cont'd

On a more personal note, my motivation in making these images (and the series of images I hope to develop in this vein) are twofold.

First, I am disheartened by the fact that our contemporary (largely "modern-western") culture perceives and treats the natural environment as endlessly manipulable. This standpoint takes the environment as a collective asset and an inventory of seemingly endless resources ... and not only objective material resources but also as a place of "enjoyment", a fount of positive or otherwise ameliorating, subjective "experiences". ... I allude to this with the extensively manipulated colours and tonality in these images.

Secondly, behind this exploitative attitude with respect to nature, there is also a kind of contemptuous familiarity. We presume that the natural environment is "ours", not just in the juridical sense of our having ownership over it, but also a sense of forwardness and assumed acquaintance ... a kind of false intimacy.

By way of countering this attitude, I sometimes use deliberately discordant, harsh colours. This is meant, in part, to induce a break in this presumed familiarity we have with nature ... and to emphasize and reintroduce an understanding of nature as being ultimately alien to us ... as something that at its core remains inaccessible to us ... as a kind of material that retains an opaque residue ... that remains essentially impenetrable despite our efforts at endless manipulation and exploitation.

I feel that we must remind ourselves of the true underlying "grandeur" of nature, not just in the sense that it is "beautiful", but also primarily formidable and even frightening ... and so, not so very readily amenable to manipulation and exploitation.

"Forms of Nature"