Week 146

When you are most relaxed, even the untrained eye will naturally gravitate to beautiful scenes and possibly develop them into incredible concepts. The eye will naturally edit out things to further develop a scene in front of you. Suddenly entire vehicles will disappear, buildings crumble, and people vanish or appear. For us, it happens without fail when we are on vacation. We jump from tourists on a leisurely stroll into the most captivated photographers within an instant. We realize that production photography flattens the image - it’s hard to get the haptic experience of viewing a vast landscape except in person. So we try to capture as much information as possible to use when we are back home recreating the amazing scene we experienced.

Then in the studio, loaded with videos, photos, and notes, we still make efforts to feel the heat and wind, to recall all the visceral feelings of being in the landscape before us. Sabka always said, “Don’t be a slave to the picture.” Meaning that trying to stay too true to the photo will leave the piece tight. Tight work leaves little room for a painterly vibrato. That vibration is where the senses are liberated and then transported. It is the ephemeral substance that conveys the feeling of sun, the texture of the air, the smell, and stickiness of the salt. So we free ourselves and let the work form beneath our brushes, connecting what the mind sees and what the spirit feels on the canvas. -K