Category Archives: Making Art

 The following interview was done with Bradley Shelton just prior to his show “Please Seat Yourself”at The Northshore Gallery of Contemporary Art. This photographic essay explores the world of Chattanooga’s Zarzour’s Cafe. A tradition in Chattanooga, Zarzour’s Cafe first opened for business in 1918, and has been in continuous operation at the same location and run by the same family ever since. The show closed at the end of September, 2014. 

See more of Bradley’s art at: Bradley Shelton

For interviews with other photographers see: Art Nomad

You’re a practicing architect here in Chattanooga. How did you also become a photographer?

Back in 1996 I went to Auburn University and majored in architecture. During my sophomore year I took part in the Rural Studio program. That’s a program that sends students out into the community, in my case Hale County, one of the poorest counties in Alabama. In the Rural Studio program the students design and build community based projects. The program required us to read the James Agee and Walker Evans book set in Hale County, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and I loved the Walker Evans photos. When I returned to Auburn, I had an elective I could take. So a buddy and I decided that we would take a photography class. We assumed it would be a breeze and take up little time, since we were focused on our studio work. Turned out it we were wrong; it turned out to be a lot of work — and fun. We shot in black & white using T-Max, a high contrast film made by Kodak. The class was based on the zone system and the goal was to teach us the basics of how to plan, to take, and to develop a photograph. As we matured as photographers, our professor began to teach us the more mental side, like how to pre-visualize a shot. Michael Robinson, an Urban Planning professor, taught this photography course at night. It was during that course and the long nights in the darkroom that I fell in love with the process and complexities of making a photograph. I got a grasp on how to handle the tonalities, and I soon began to pre-visualize how I wanted a photo to look before I snapped the shot.

What equipment did you use on “Please Seat Yourself”?

My camera and equipment are all Nikon, and the camera I use is a D-700. But I don’t get too hung up on equipment. As they say, the best camera is the one you have with you. There are several images in the show I took with my cell phone. You can get a great photo with a cheap camera, and a crappy one with $10,000 state of the art equipment. In the end, it’s about the ability of the photographer and his artistic vision that make all the difference. I not saying that using good equipment isn’t important–it’s a huge part of what I do–it’s just not the essential part.

Do you still use the methods you were taught in film even though you’ve moved to digital?

I definitely continue to rely on the zone system — the 12 zones of gradiation from solid black to solid white. Of course, digital photography has changed the way you pre-visualize. With film you really had to plan carefully in the camera: “the sky is going to be in zone 9 and the tree is going to be in zone 2”, that sort of thing. You still have to capture the right exposure, but the majority of the tonal decisions are made in post-processing. Shooting digitally frees you to focus more on composition, because with the proper exposure, the tonalities can be set during the development process. This equates to less time behind the camera, more time developing in Photoshop.

So today Photoshop is the equivalent of the dark room experience?

Yes, it’s very similar in a lot of ways. Some of the terminology is different, but from an artistic standpoint it’s essentially the same process. I think it was Ansel Adams who said, that when you click the shutter, it’s about capturing information. Art is what happens in the dark room as you work with that information. If you think of it that way, then digital and film are very similar. Of course, with sheet film you have more limited chances when shooting. A roll of 35mm film might give you only 36 shots, and I can take 1,000 in an afternoon with a digital camera. Adams also said, photographs are made, not taken. Snapping the shutter is only half of the process of making a photograph. You’re trying to capture all the information you can,in the camera.  Whether it’s in the dark room or on the computer, if you have the information, you can make the image you want.

What film editing programs do you use?

I use Photoshop and Lightroom. Sometimes I use Apple Aperture for certain things, but mostly it’s the first two.

Why do you favor black & white?

I think my interest in black & white comes from my study of form—that’s what draws me to architecture. There’s something about black & white that seems to abstract form, I think, more so than color images. Black & white kind of distills everything.

So you visualize and shoot in black & white?

I typically visualize and develop in black & white, but I shoot in color.

Why?

Most digital cameras have a black and white setting, but much of the tonal information is lost so I never use it. With color there are 256 variations and when shooting in the camera’s black and white mode it will only capture those 12 or so gray tones.  So the camera is interpolating how to condense 256 colors into 12 shades of gray [laughs]. That would make and interesting book title.  No, I want control over the tonality of the image and I want all the information possible. I want to control that conversion to black and white.

 

Are you thinking of the 12 zone system when you set up a shot, even if you’re shooting in color?

Sure. There’s an image in the show I call “Pork and Dressing”. It’s an image of a plate of food I was about to start chowing down on, but I saw a beam of light hitting the plate, making it lighter than everything around it. So I thought, ‘I really need a photo of that!’ Now because of the way the light was hitting the plate, it needed to be in an upper zone, brighter than anything else. The surrounding area would be in a lower darker zone. So you see, the zone system is a way to visual the structure of the photo as well as something to use later in Photoshop. It helps you understand and analyze what you’re seeing and where you’re trying to get to.

Well, you certainly get blacks and grays that are rich and compelling. I liked that when I first saw your series, “Pig Roast”. How do you get that kind of tonality?

You have to expose the photo with that in mind. We’ve talked some about the differences between film and digital, but another of those differences is that in film you expose for your darks, trying to keep as much detail in them as you can. If you get those right, you can handle the highlights okay. With digital, it’s the opposite. You expose to give detail in the highlights. If you don’t, they will wash out and you lose that information.

Now, in both “Pig Roast” and “Please Seat Yourself”, the theme was about people and everyday things. Both required a lower key approach tonally—a deeper, richer look. For me, low key imagery and those subjects go together. So that was driving my desire for  rich dark tones. Still, there are exceptions in the show, like ‘Pork and Dressing’, where the image is in a higher key. I felt that particular situation warranted an overall lighter tonality. Still, at the point where I’m taking the picture the technical aspect is about getting the exposure right. This allows me to focus on the composition of the subject. I think what I’m saying is that I want to make the shot in camera as close as possible to the finished image.

That surprises me. I just assumed you cropped your way into the wonderful compositions your photos have.

No, that’s not my approach. There are occasions when I see something in the development stage that surprises me—something I didn’t notice when shooting and cropping is necessary. Sometimes an image is made better by a healthy crop, but I don’t enter into the process with the mindset that I can just crop later to get a good image.  Most of the time the final composition is what comes out of the camera.

Tell me about the experience of doing this project on Zarzour’s Cafe. It was a long term commitment, which is quite different than, say, doing an afternoon shoot studying the changing shadows on an old building.

Yeah, it was long term. I worked on “Please Seat Yourself” for three years—I thought it would take six months (laughs). Most of the images in the show come from my last two years of shooting. I’ve done the kind of afternoon shoot you’re talking about, but with “Pig Roast” and “Please Seat Yourself”, the idea of the story was just part of the subject.  With “Pig Roast”, we were having ayearly pig roast, and after taking pictures for several years, a story with a timeline emerged. The same thing happened with Zarzour’s, but with an added dimension. I hadn’t worked on that series long before I thought, these are great people! They are real salt of the earth kind of folks, and it is their story that drove the project. It made me want to invest the time and effort to make them proud. I got to know them as people and as friends. I came to find that being there, just talking with them and showing them some of the pictures, had another dividend. I became in a way invisible, well, maybe not invisible, but everyone was comfortable with me shooting and it allowed an honest view of things. I gained an acceptance and an ease of access that made the story deeper.

Why Zarzour’s Café? How did you decide on that subject?

The photographing ofthe yearly pig roast led me to the idea of working on a series done over time. I wanted to tell a story about a place through images.  To be special it hadto gain deeper insights than you could hope for on an afternoon shoot. So from there it was not too big a step to Zarzour’s. I’ve been eating there since I moved to Chattanooga, eight years ago. Chattanooga is lucky to have great places like Zarzour’s Cafe, or Nikki’s Drive-in, or Griffith’s Hotdogs. Places that are long established and have incredible character. So many of those places are gone, driven out by the big chains, and that’s sad. You don’t go in a chain burger joint and chat with the waitress about how her kid did in his baseball game. In places like Zarzour’s, you become part of an extended family. So anyway, I’d been eating there for a while and one day I walked up to Shannon, who now runs Zarzour’s, and showed her my pig roast photos and said, “You mind if I take some pictures around here?” and she said, “Sure.” So every couple of weeks I’d come in and take some pictures. If I got one I liked, I’d print it and show it around to the folks there. I got to know everyone and it just felt more and more natural. One morning, I met Mary at 7:00am and photographed her as she prepared food for the day. It reminded me of my grandmother’s kitchen, how she prepared food, and that’s kind of close to my heart. So I guess that’s how it happened. I showed up one day and said, “I want a roast beef plate and I want to take some pictures.” They are great people and damn if they didn’t let me do it [laughs].

To what extent were you shooting to a prior mental narrative, one you carried with you through the door, and to what extent did your narrative just evolve from what you were seeing and photographing as you tried to make sense of it?

The only plan I had when I started was a notion that it would be great to document aesthetically what the place looked like. I mean allthe pictures on the wall are their family and close friends. Hell, Charles Zarzour’s immigration papers are hanging on the wall. Amazing! The imagery of the space is what attracted me to take the first pictures. Then from that, the urge to tell the daily story of the place emerged. What makes Zarzour’s is that particular family. They’ve run it for four generations, and over time the place has become a portrait of them. But you know, I recently noticed another thing. After three years of taking pictures, I realized you can also read this essay, not onlyas a portrait of the people, but as the story of one day in the life of the restaurant. “Please Seat Yourself” begins with a closed café and ends, after all the activity, the same way. The show could have been entitled, “A Day in the Life of Zarzour’s Café.”

Do you have plans to do additional essays like “Please Seat Yourself” on other local cultural landmarks?

I don’t know as I’ve made that decision yet. I would like to. I think the focus of any project of this nature would be the people involved. Could I do a Barber Shop? There’s potential there. Griffith’s Hotdogs have been around a long time and it has a certain character that is unique in Chattanooga, It’s different from Zarzour’s Café but it’s the same, too. I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t know where the camera will take me.  I think whatever I work on next, it’s important to me that there be an element of Chattanooga in there—that the places be in Chattanooga. These places are important to our culture. They have survived. How did they do they do it? I think it has something to do with the people.

 Return to Interviews with Artists

Ellyn Bivin’s paintings are, by turns, colorful, whimsical, thoughtful, and mysterious. Nuanced surfaces, painted with analogous colors, provide the background for local images that appear to dance in relation to each other. The viewer immediately sees the artist’s joy in playing off visual ideas against each other. Those elements—children, birds, houses, feathers, dogs, and cats—can be dramatically present, partly hidden, or subtly disguised.

See more of Ellyn’s art at: Ellen Bivin

For interviews with other painters, see: Josiah Golson / David Jones / James Mckissic / Renel Plouffe / James Tucker / Larry Young

Ellyn’s studio, located in a small cottage that once belonged to her grandmother, is just a short walk from the home she shares with her husband, Ken, along the Tennessee River in Chattanooga. It was in this neighborhood that Ellyn spent her childhood years. The main room of the cottage/studio is well-lit and airy, with several of her recent paintings, in differing states of completion, resting on easels. In the center of the room are tables where she teaches painting. Her student’s work, an assignment based on a still life of lemons, is on the wall. In an adjoining room is a painting by Ellyn’s daughter, Mamie, who is currently an art student at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Indeed, both of Ellyn’s children, her daughter Mamie and her son Robbie, are artists. 

“I started as a little girl drawing horses because that’s what little girls do. Over the years my subject matter expanded,” she says with a laugh, “but I am often drawn toward children and animals as subjects. My subjects, however I handle them, are people or animals that mean something to me.”

Ellyn has been a fixture in the Chattanooga art scene since the 1980s when she showed with a group of artists who formed the collaborative group Square One. “Ann Poss, a noted regional printmaker, bought a house on Oak Street that she divided into artist studios. Ann had a studio downstairs, as I did. Alan White, the UTC professor, was upstairs, along with Joe Helseth, who is now a professor at Chattanooga State. We were putting on shows around Chattanooga, and we decided we needed a name for the group, but we could never agree on one. It always seemed like every suggestion would get rejected. We’d have to start over—we were always going back to square one. Finally someone suggested we use Square One for the name. That group lasted a few years and became part of the origins of the Association for Visual Arts. The Hunter Museum had a show of our art at one point. We called it “Two x Two,” and it traveled to our sister city, Wuxi, China. They sent their art here, and we sent ours over to them.”

“I don’t want to nail everything down for the viewer. I want them to use their imagination. I want my pictures to have a bit of mystery about them.”

Ellyn briefly attended the University of Tennessee Chattanooga before transferring and earning a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, with an emphasis on printmaking and art education. “I took a beginning course in printmaking as a freshman at UTC and really loved it. When I got to Virginia Commonwealth, it was great. VCU had a printmaking department and absolutely amazing equipment. I just fell in love with the whole process of making prints, particularly intaglio, because I love to draw. I did a lot of lithographs, too, because of the drawing.”

Ellyn loved drawing, but she had no desire to be a painter. “I never got into painting much. I just took painting classes because I had to fulfill my requirements for a degree. I wasn’t a dedicated painter at all. I was a printmaker. I was even snooty about it. ‘Painter? I’m a printmaker!’”

Returning to her hometown, she enrolled at UTC to take additional coursework, though the school did not offer an MFA. “George Cress, the head of the art school at the time, let me use the printmaking equipment. At first, I’d pay for a class to make it official, but after a while, he decided I didn’t have to pay if I was helping out around the department. In addition to more routine jobs, I printed editions for the professors. They would design the plate, and I would print it.”

It was then that she became interested in monoprints, and the change had an impact on Ellyn’s development as an artist. With lithography or etching, the artist draws with a waxy crayon on a stone or cuts into the surface of a metal plate. The goal is to print multiple copies. With monoprint, as the name implies, only one impression is produced, either by painting or making a collage on a block. Monoprint is the most ‘painterly’ method among the printmaking techniques. For Ellyn, it stood as a bridge between pure printmaking and an embrace of painting.

“When I began doing the monoprints, I used to lay things down–torn strips of old phone book paper, for instance–and roll ink over them. I would lift that up, maybe roll back over it, wipe some ink out, and then use stencils. I started working in black and white, and I remember the first time I saw the image the ripped paper had made. I thought, ‘Wow! That’s a landscape!”

It wasn’t long before she was using color in her monoprints, and her move toward painting was underway. “As I worked with increasingly complicated imagery and used more colors, the monoprints took more and more time to produce—really, they were paintings.”

“I move elements around on the surface,” she says. “It’s all about balance for me—playing one thing off against another. My imagery is always moving around.”

Ellyn found herself doing more and more painting, but in a style that echoed her experiences as a printmaker. She loves the way the monoprints look and seeks to rediscover those effects in her work. “Right now,” she says, “I’m trying to ‘print’ my paintings. By that, I mean I’m doing them in layers like I did with the monoprints. I’m trying to use the whole process I used to use doing my monoprints.”

Though she paints on both canvas and rigid supports, she often prefers to work on rugged surfaces like Masonite, which can stand up to multiple reworkings of the surface. Indeed, she says her method of making a painting remains fairly close to the way she produces monoprints, but with a difference. Since the surface isn’t used to make an impression on paper, it isn’t done in reverse. It is the final statement of the artist’s intentions.

“My backgrounds are often based on analogous colors with offsetting highlights. I suppose because of my printmaking background, I just naturally exploit the flatness of the surface plain. Analogous color is a useful part of doing that.”

A painting that will be in her next show features the figures of two girls. The pose of these figures, replicated in different sizes, is unusual, and the shadows they cast form a strong compositional element, which are, from a common perspective, impossible and contradictory. Such considerations don’t matter to Ellyn. She uses all means at her disposal to create a visual world that is at once familiar to the viewer and ambiguous. “I want to make pictures that cause you to use your imagination. I don’t want to nail everything down for the viewer. I want them to use their imagination. I want my pictures to have a bit of mystery about them.”

As for her subject matter, Ellyn chooses elements from her everyday life, which she celebrates in paint. “I draw my own designs from source materials,” she says. “I like to work with the human figure and with animals. Often, I develop ideas from old photographs. I draw my designs and cut out stencils. After putting several layers of paint on a gessoed ground, I then begin moving the stencils around, seeking a balanced composition. That’s the great thing about stencils–they allow you to establish composition, which I can embellish or not, depending on the picture’s needs.”

It is this process of carefully working out her composition by manipulating various drawn and stenciled basic elements against a background painted in layers that gives a dynamic, almost rhythmic, quality to her paintings. These elements can have unexpected relationships that add surprises for the viewer. In the detail of her painting, ‘The Immigrants, ‘ we see several figures, some readily apparent, some drawn in silhouette, some barely suggested, and some seeming to emerge from the background. This, the title of the painting suggests, is the ambiguity of the immigrant experience. A deft use of apparent and concealed meaning reappears in many of Ellyn’s works. 

Ellyn Bivin– Leading by a Nose 18×30 Acrylic on panel

Ellyn’s paintings also reveal her whimsical sense of humor. “I definitely have a sense of humor that I like to bring to my work,” she says. “I even like to give my paintings silly titles sometimes. I had a painting where I used a dog as an important visual element, and I couldn’t resist naming my painting, ‘Where the Nose Leads, the Tail Follows!’. When I was taking a sculpture class, I did a series of tongue-in-cheek pieces, such as one entitled Chest of Drawers, which was a human torso with drawers in it. I don’t think art has to be dead serious to be good.”

Return to Interviews with Artists

The Members of Art Nomad — April Bell, Caitlin Sciscoe, Jordan Bailey, and Le Le Leseur

 See more of Art Nomad’s art at: Art Nomad

For additional interviews with photographers see: Bradley Shelton

In March of 2014, four photographers who often exhibit together and who call their collective, Art Nomad, had a special one week show at Graffiti Gallery. The show was entitled, “Symbiosis”. Soon to graduate from the Savannah College of Art and Design (Atlanta Campus), they had already had several shows in Atlanta. This interview was conducted with all the members present a few weeks prior to the opening of their show.

How long have you been together as Art Nomad?

JB: It’s been ten months since our first show, but we began working together as a group about six months before that. Last year we had two shows in Atlanta galleries. One was at The Cube Gallery, and the theme was ‘Identity’. The other was at the C4 Arts Center and was called ‘The Art of Story Telling’.  Le Le was the mastermind behind our name, Art Nomad. Originally we started with six people, but being students and having jobs made the logistics pretty hard, so some people dropped out when they found they just couldn’t handle the extra work. Caitlin, myself, and Le Le have been part of the group from the beginning, but this is April’s first show with us.

What dynamics are involved with working as a group?

LL: We’re all dedicated to what we do, and we work together well. We really care about each other as people and not just as fellow artists. Even when we don’t have a show we’re always meeting and talking with each other about what we’re working on, our ideas, critiquing old work, thinking and planning. That’s what makes us tick as a group: we’re always pushing and inspiring each other.

“(In)Justice is a quality relating to unfairness or undeserved outcomes. The past few years have generated an intense and unsettling conversation on injustice within the judicial system. To the general public these injustices were powered by an underlying racial discrimination. Fueled by the media, the cases were questioned over and over again as being a direct effect of racial discrimination. My photos depict the facts that I came across. Whether big or small, these facts were present. I want to present to the viewer a simplified view of some of these facts in hopes that you take away from this your own decision, regardless of the racial influence.”– Le Le Leseur   Le Le Leseur

AB: The group drives us and we drive the group. As a group we’re out there getting shows together and promoting our work. At the same time, the group helps each individual process what she’s doing, providing fresh eyes and suggesting ways to make the work better.

LL: As individuals we all have different ideas toward our work, but we all push to create work that goes beyond the traditional idea of what photography is. We all consider ourselves artists working in the medium of photography.

JB: The shows we’ve done and will do are something that working as a group can bring to us, but the binding force in Art Nomad is just the group itself. Before I found Art Nomad I didn’t really have a notion of belonging. Now I belong with this group. I think we all belong with this group.

Do you think it’s important to the group dynamics that you’re all women?

CS: Wow, I don’t believe we’ve ever given any thought to that!

AB: The photography department at SCAD is very female heavy, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any guys around who would want to work with us. However, our group is really strong and it just so happens that we are all women.

When you began putting together Symbiosis, did you plan it so each member’s work would re-enforce the work of the others?

AB: When we began working on this show we thought about a theme, but we decided it should be about the group. That’s why we called it ‘Symbiosis’. When you look at how artists have banded together in the past, I think the goal of this show becomes clearer. For instance, Ansel Adams had a group of photographers around him who worked as a collaborative group. Artists have worked both individually and in groups all through time. They influence each other and present work together.

LL: There are narratives in all our work, but we aren’t fitting those narratives to a single theme. We are presenting narratives from our own point of view.

CS:  A really important common element in all our work is storytelling. Finding ways to combine the aesthetics of art with a conceptual approach based on narrative is very important to us. Since there are elements and aspects of art that we all have in common, that’s really what forms the central thread of Symbiosis. Each of us will tell our own narrative, but I think the viewer will see general themes emerge based on our commonalities.

Why did each of you choose photography and how did you come to see that as your medium?

JB: My mom was a photographer and a writer who worked for the Amarillo Globe News and some other Texas newspapers. Following in her footsteps, I was on my high school newspaper. They needed someone who had dealt with a camera, and I thought doing it would be fun.  I became obsessed with photography and with the whole process, and when people began to respond to my work, even though it was just in a high school newspaper, I realized I could communicate that way. Later in college I had a boyfriend who was a film guy and we fell in love doing art and using cameras, lenses, and film. I got my degree in mass communication but I knew I wanted to go to art school in photography and enrolled at SCAD.

“I chose to feature my series of film stills from my short story Pennae Allae, which means Feather Wings in Latin. This story of redemption allows me to create allegorical characters that represent the actions of the corruptly powerful and the selfless who sacrifice much to preserve their culture. This work focuses on the importance of imagination, forgiveness, and the relentless pursuit of justice and authenticity. The photographs in this series are meant to be viewed in relationship to each other, but they also stand alone as visual escapes from reality and the non-magical physics of this atmosphere.”

  —Jordan Bailey  Jordan Bailey

LL: I was a late bloomer. I never saw myself as an artist growing up; I just knew I had a creative voice that I needed to let speak. I wrote poetry a lot. In my first college I took an art course and was exposed to the work of lots of modern artists who expressed their messages simply and directly. Then I took a photography course and I loved it—really loved it. I loved the dark room, and the chemicals, and just everything. Then I started working in digital and found my voice. I could tell my own story and have my own voice.

CS: My mother was an artist and as soon as I could hold a pencil she had me doing all kinds of art. I got into painting, drawing, and collage. She was the one who gave me my first camera and enrolled me in a photography class. When she passed away I didn’t do photography for two years; it just reminded me too much of her. In time I came to the realization that art was just a part of me and I was miserable not doing art. I wanted to use art to capture the emotional country I was going through at that time in my life. Photography was a way to explore. I started with self-portraiture and the ideas that came out of that. Now I want to make art for the digital age and my work has a strong emphasis on exploiting the digital aspects of photography – Photoshop and the manipulation of the image.

AB: My dad always had a camera in his hands and took pictures of everything – horrible pictures. He grew up poor and he said he wanted to document everything he could from our family because he had so little remaining from his birth family. I hated being photographed. One day I took the camera and photographed him. I thought, ‘Wow, I can make something from this!’ I didn’t take an actual photography class until my senior year in high school – it was a dark room class – and I fell in love with it. I went off to college at the University of West Georgia and was there about six months before I packed up and came back home. My family wasn’t very happy about that, but I’d made my decision. For the next two years all I did was photography. Then I enrolled at SCAD.

You all work digitally, and the possibilities for manipulating the image are practically endless. How do you feel about that?

AB: The image that you end with is not usually the image that you take. You have to make the final image as you saw it.

CS: As you saw it as an artist.

AB: Yes, as you experienced it and you how you want to portray that experience to the viewer. I don’t do a lot of manipulation in my work. I’ll restore the old photos that I’m working with to a certain point, but I want to keep an essence that says, “I’m old.” As for my new photography, I don’t do much manipulation with that either. I just try to get the artifact, the image, to reflect what was meaningful to my eye when I took the original shot.

CS: I think we all approach photography as a way of making art and not just as documentation. The advertising work that some of us do is more of a gray area. For my fine art work, I think Photoshop is an amazing tool.

So do you take the original photograph just as a point of departure and manipulate your way to personal statement?

CS: It really depends on my concepts and the starting point. I have no problem with pulling material from multiple sources and combining and altering it to get what I want as an artist. Not all of my work is heavily Photoshopped, but if that’s necessary, then I’ll do it.

“Art is more than an expression to me – it is an exploration and a conversation. I find myself turning my work towards the discussion of identity within a greater cultural context. Rather than creating highly introverted work, I want to raise relevant and relatable questions about what identity is, who controls it, and how it can be affected by outside influences. Combining these concepts with my love for digital art is what brought me to my latest series, Lights.”

– Caitlin Sciscoe  Caitlin Sciscoe

 

JB: As an artist I want to create an experience for the viewer. How the camera, as a machine, records ‘reality’ won’t necessarily look the same as my personal ‘reality’. Besides I like to create alternate ideas of reality. I don’t want someone to look at one of my images and think it’s bad Photoshop, and I don’t use Photoshop just to use Photoshop, but I do use it to create something that I feel is both believable and fantastical at the same time. In my work for Pennae Allae, which is Latin for ‘feather wings’, I have used it when necessary in order to create a world of fantasy. It’s hard to find actors who can actually fly through the air so I had to do that digitally, of course. My goal, however, was to create an ‘other reality’ that people will accept.

LL: As far as manipulating the image goes, it’s sort of back and forth with me. What I want to showcase to the viewer will determine how much I use Photoshop. But let’s face it, all art is manipulation. Even if you don’t use Photoshop at all, there are still the effects of lenses and the camera settings that can produce all sorts of alteration of reality. Even the idea of “bad Photoshop” is an idea that some artists art taking and running with. They use Photoshop in ways that are objectively bad, but force the viewer into a ‘why?’ reaction. We learn the rules so we can break the rules.

AB: Context and intent are the key.

CS: Yeah, it’s not taking a photograph, it’s making a photograph.

LL: People think of photography as documenting reality, but as artists, we often go against what the viewer expects a photograph to be.

CS: I think photography in the future will no longer be about reality as much. Just as Jackson Pollock dripped paint and walked on his canvas and took painting to a new place, I think the expression available digitally has done that for photography.

AB: Really, Photoshop and digital techniques have just brought manipulation of the image out of the shadows, or out of the dark room, so people are aware of it and can question it. It allows them to ask more direct questions about what they see. In the past, photos, such as those in Life magazine, were taken as simply true. With the coming of digital age, people are becoming visually sophisticated enough to see the image as the truth of the artist.

LL: You can manipulate your photo 1% or 99% but you have to take in to account what the viewer will accept as the truth – literally or artistically.

CS: And the pendulum constantly swings back and forth in art. When digital alteration of the image has been pushed long enough there will be a swing back toward a more minimalist approach.

LL: Yeah, I think that’s already happening.

Let’s talk a bit about your subject matter. To what extent does it need to be personal for you and to what extent is it just material to work on?

CS: Anything you choose to photograph becomes personal because you chose to photograph it.

LL: I feel the same way. And even if it has nothing to do with you, you still find connections with it as you work with it.

JB: Yes, even with commercial photography there still can be a personal element. I shoot for a jewelry company and my goal is to make the best possible photographs and to use my skills to please the client, but  of course It is more personal and more meaningful doing art photography. I’m very interested in ideas and was a world religions minor before coming to SCAD. I am drawn to explore other people’s belief systems and how those exist. Work involving that sort of thing is very personal for me.

AB: For me it definitely has to have a personal element, and I find that to be very powerful in the old photos I use. It has to be personal but you also have to have an eye for compelling aesthetic portrayal, too. I’ve been asked if my source material had to be my own family photos or could I just use something I picked up in an antique store. I could certainly do it technically from someone else’s pictures, but my family photos have meaning for me because I feel I’m giving life to the people of my past.

“Forgotten objects left out for the earth to devour, homes left without families to house and once cherished photos now forgotten and hidden away. For me these things are only mysteries waiting to be solved. I’m presenting five different sets of photographs in this show and each set contains a combination of found photographs, abstractions and abandoned objects. Each has a story to tell. Some are about the people while others are focused on the objects they’ve left behind.”

– April Bell   April Bell

 

CS: As fine art photographers we’re lucky to be working at the present time. Photography has changed so much, and now things are wide open. For this show I’m creating visual abstractions and really pushing and stretching myself.

In what ways do the colors you choose or the choice not to use color impact your work?

AB: Since I’m working with old photos that are sepia now or have a pale washed-out color to them, my palette has to be muted. It’s funny, but I only became aware of that after looking back over work I had done. My color choice evolved organically. Now, I’d have to say, those choices are much more consciously made.

JB: I think I tend to gravitate toward cool tones – blues and greens. But really, my palette is suggested by the subject. In Pennae Allae there are two different worlds, and I use different color tones as a way of making the differences explicit. In the more magical world I use smoke and blues to create a different atmosphere.

CS: How you choose to use color is very important. There’s the whole psychology of color and the cultural reference it has, so once again, I think it all relates back to the narrative of the work you’re presenting. I always shoot in color and then make decisions on if and how to modify it.

LL: The way I like to approach color is to think in terms of both how people react to color and how they will react to the juxtaposition of colors. In the work I’m doing now, the backgrounds are these jubilant pinks and blues, but the objects in the forefront are peaceful and serene greens.

How does the size of the finished piece factor in?

AB: When I work from family photos I want the intimacy that a small print size provides. The old snap shots are intimate things, and I want the viewer to get close, see the detail, and enter into a dialogue with the image. With the really large format panoramas I’ve done, it’s very different. With those I want people to experience a sense of actually being in, and enveloped by, a specific place.

LL: Sometimes there is a real struggle around the issue of size. Viewers usually want to see everything big. We get told in our classes to “go big or go home”, but that demand can be at odds with the subject or with what we want the viewer to feel about the subject. You have to ask yourself if bigger really is better or if smaller would be better.

Granted you are all at the beginning of your careers, but do you have a sense of where you work will be going over the next few years?

JB: I’m going to be working on and expanding Pennae Allae. That’s the big project that I want to get done.

LL: I see myself exploring how photography relates to other art forms. I also think that a strong narrative approach will remain important to me.

CS: I got into photography to explore who I am. Looking back, I see a progression from self-portraits, to my family, to my immediate surroundings. Moving forward, I see the process of exploring my identity continuing and spreading outward. Culturally who am I? How do I relate to the outside world? I’d also like to start exploring the possibilities in printing on things like glass and aluminum.

AB: I’ve become interested in installation, so I may do something there, but frankly, I’m in love with what I’m doing right now, so I’ll just go where the art takes me and try not to overthink things.

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(Usually I do the interviews for Jackson Point Art, however interviewing oneself is rather awkward. I would like to thank Deborah Tucker for doing this one. )

James Tucker was born in Connecticut and lived there until his family moved to Clemson, South Carolina when he was 10 years old. A graduate of the University of Georgia, he worked in Atlanta before he and his wife moved to the Cumberland Plateau near South Pittsburg, Tennessee. He has shown his work at a number of galleries and art shows over the years, most recently at City Hall in Chattanooga.

See more of James’s art at: James Tucker

For interviews with other painters see: Ellyn Bivin / Josiah Golson  / David Jones / James McKissic / Renel Plouffe /  Larry Young

You’ve been involved with art for a long time now, haven’t you?

Yes, I have. I entered the art school at the University of Georgia in 1965, took all the foundation courses toward my art degree, and did some studio work with David Paul and Mike Torlen before switching my major to History at the end of my junior year. Later, I took studio classes at the Atlanta College of Art and at Callanwolde Arts Center. Two of the teachers at Callanwolde, Amelia James and Karen Stinnett, were very helpful in my development as an artist.

You come from an artistic background. I believe your grandmother was an artist and knew some of the American impressionist painters of the Old Lyme School. Did she encourage you as an artist?

The artists she knew were active in Old Lyme during the 1920s and 30s. I suppose you would call it the ‘second flowering’ of the Old Lyme School. Her name was Helen B. Tucker (nee Hunt), and she was born in Providence, Rhode Island, only moving to the Old Lyme, Connecticut area after her marriage. She was a small but formidable woman and in no way ‘grandmotherly,’ but she gave me my first set of oil paints when I was eleven or twelve years old.  She also provided an occasional piece of advice. I’d been painting in watercolor, taking lessons from Olivia McGhee, a local artist in Clemson, South Carolina. There were more failures than successes, and I was getting discouraged with my work. I told Gram I couldn’t paint in watercolor. She said, “Have you painted a hundred watercolors? You won’t know whether you can manage a medium like that until you do.” I don’t know how serious she was about one hundred paintings, but she made her point. I kept working and shortly thereafter produced the first painting that my family framed: a picture of the Mayflower at sea. My youngest daughter, Molly, has it at her home in England. It was the “Magnum Opus” of my early period. [Laughs]  Another time when we were visiting her, Gram took me out sketching. I was proud of what I’d done until we showed each other our work for the day. She was sweet about it, but the difference in what we’d done was obvious and painful to me.

But you move from smaller watercolor pieces to larger work in oil.

 For a long time, I stayed with watercolor and pen & ink. In the 1980s and 90s, my work was represented by galleries in the Atlanta area and in Greenville, South Carolina. My life was hectic, and watercolor doesn’t require much space and is easy to set up. When we moved to Tennessee, I switched to working in oil because I had the time and the studio space. In the summer of 2004, I built a small sailboat with my stepson, Andrew. I enjoyed sailing it and began painting what I saw on the river. My goal was to create a dreamy, timelessness, which is how I usually feel when out sailing.

In the last few years, your paintings have shifted from quiet, almost meditational landscapes to a focus on the human figure. What brought about the change?

David Jones approached me in 2011 about showing in his new gallery, Graffiti. Since his art and the focus of the gallery was non-representational, I didn’t see how that could work  I turned him down several times, thinking my style wouldn’t fit in, but he persisted, and I finally said yes. I don’t know what I was thinking.

And did you fit in?

No, not at all. There were abstract expressionists, geometric constructionists, and color field painters like David–and me. I should have withdrawn after the first show.

But you didn’t.

No. I respected David’s vision for the gallery and became intrigued with the work of some of the other artists. I gave it a try. For almost two years, I painted work that was totally different from anything I’d done since art school. I also switched from oil to acrylic to take advantage of acrylic’s faster drying time and all the mediums and foundation materials that are available. I’d never worked in acrylic before.

Did you enjoy working that way?

It was tough. You hear people say their five-year-old daughter can paint better than a famous abstract, but that’s just garbage. I did some interesting paintings and painted over a lot of failures. I’m okay with the best of my work from that time, but I never felt comfortable in that idiom. Where in the past I’d been communicating with symbols I shared with the viewer—trees, water, sky, clouds—I now found myself attempting to make a statement without those things. It was very difficult, and I couldn’t sustain that approach. But the year wasn’t wasted. When I came back to a more representational style of painting, this time working with the human figure, I brought along a lot of what I’d learned and experimented with. I now paint my figures with far less detail than in the past, concentrating instead on the expressive qualities of the human form as a semi-abstract shape. It’s very gratifying to me that those paintings have been well received.

How do you reconcile the changes in your art over the past ten years?

I suppose the differences in my style arise from contradictions in my personality. On the one hand, I am introverted and have no problem being alone in the studio all day, day after day, talking only with my wife in the evening. I think that’s the quiet place the urge to paint landscapes comes from. On the other hand, people really fascinate me. I never tire of watching them move about and interact with one another. I love seeing how little ‘mini-stories’ unfold. I wish I lived in a place with a sidewalk café where I could sit and watch every afternoon. Obviously, that interest forms a direct link to the figurative work. Yet, like the landscapes, a lower-keyed, quiet sensibility remains. I view the human experience as something that’s difficult and fundamentally lonely. People struggle, often with great courage, to find meaning and order through their experiences and relationships. My figurative paintings are an attempt to express that.

In paintings like Adieu and Wayfarer (2), you present people in a state of reflection, but the context is enigmatic.

Yes, that’s intentional. I want to provide some context but not offer defining information. What I like is for viewers to enter into the image. They bring with them a state of mind that is real for them and not dictated by me. If you make things too specific, your work becomes an illustration because the image limits the range of responses from the viewer. I want viewers to embrace the story as it exists within them in a way that connects to their minds and emotions.  I want viewers to look at my figures and tell their own stories, not mine. It’s very pleasing when people ascribe different ‘stories’ to my figure paintings. There’s no right reaction or, rather, every reaction is the right one. The essential meaning of any painting arises between the painting and the viewer.

I grant that different viewers would see your work in different ways. But you have a firm idea of the story, even if you conceal it. Could it be that, in a sense, these seemingly anonymous figures are self-portraits?

I suppose you’re right. I’m painting my thoughts and moods, my feelings and ideas. I could walk up to someone viewing one of my paintings and tell that person exactly what the figure in the painting is thinking and feeling. I know all the backstories, but, of course, they are my backstories. I did a painting called “The Last Table” and was delighted when people formed all sorts of ideas about what was going on with the three figures. I know what I was thinking when I painted it, but each viewer’s story is as ‘right’ as mine is.

You live on the Cumberland Plateau and paint in a book-lined studio away from the world. It’s not what one would expect from someone painting night scenes of people in the city.

No, my world isn’t a downtown loft sort of place, but I’m fascinated with cities. My wife and I have spent many days just rambling about in cities in the US and Europe with no plan or goal. At night, the shapes become more abstract, and the sense of mystery and possibility grows.

What is your process when making a painting today?

My methods now are somewhat similar to how I’ve worked in the past. I will observe something around me or see some visual motif in a photo. It’s usually just a spark of an idea or a feeling. I’ll make a note and a quick sketch. If it’s a photo, I still make notes and a sketch. I periodically check through my files and notes, and if something strikes me and I want to carry forward I start making thumbnail sketches, just playing around with visual ideas. Sometimes, there’s a preliminary gouache involved, but often, I work up the painting from the sketches alone. If I paint the gouache, I edit that and work on the final painting using the study painting and its notes as my reference. There have been times, however, when I decide that the study painting says everything I have to say and I just stop there. “Scene de Vie (1)” is an example.

Although the tonal range in many of your paintings is striking, your palette is usually subdued and based on cool hues. Is that a conscious choice or an unconscious aspect of your style?

I’m very drawn to the tonalities in black & white, whether it’s ink drawing, old movies, or 1950s TV. I did a lot of pen & Ink and ink wash drawing early on and love the dramatic tonal juxtapositions you get with the pen or the subtle shades of gray available with ink wash. No one would call me a great colorist. I know enough about color and color theory to use it the way I want, but tonality, not color, is central to my work. Cooler bluish tones, blacks, and grays are what attract me. When making a painting, my goal is to get the underlying abstract structure of the painting correct and tonally balanced. If I get that right, I usually have what I’m after.

Several of your new paintings have a very rough surface. What’s going on there?

When I was painting nonrepresentationally, I experimented with different surfaces, and one was made by mixing sawdust into gesso primer. That was the surface used for a painting called “Threads of Time.” It is rough and irregular. It forces me to keep my painting loose since detail is impossible. It also provides an interesting way to layer colors. You can paint on a base color and then carefully bring a brush back over the area with a much lighter or darker color, just touching the very top of the textured surface.

You used that surface in your “Wanderers” paintings. Would you talk a bit about those?

Those paintings originally began with all the images I was seeing of the refugee crises happening around the world. There are seemingly endless armed conflicts forcing people from their homes. These people become rootless, wandering, going from something but not to something. I find that very troubling. As I thought about it, I began to consider the process of wandering in broader terms. I began to wonder if we are all wanderers to a greater or lesser degree. We’re born into this world where there is no instruction manual, no roadmap for existence. We spend our lives trying to figure out how to make our way. I think we all, if we are honest with ourselves, go through life making the best go of it we can, but not really knowing what’s over the next hill or what we are supposed to do about it. Of course, political refugees have all that to contend with, and they’ve had their way of life destroyed by madmen.

You’re a writer as well as a visual artist. Does that influence your work?

Yes. I love stories, and I process life in terms of story. It’s central to my worldview and how I get some sense of psychic order. That was what was so tough for me doing abstract painting—there’s no story! I felt caught in the endless process of applying paint. In my current work I try to avoid a sense of literalness, but all my painting is about story. My writing about art and my interviews with artists also help broaden my thinking about my own work. I find that my writing about others provides an important source of new ideas for me.

 What artists, and I suppose I should add writers, influenced you the most?

I love the pen drawings of Rembrandt and Goya. Using just a quill pen, they could do so much with so little—a few squiggly lines come alive as a person. I’ve also studied the great late 19^th and early 20^th century pen & ink illustrators like Coll, Gibson, Flagg, and so on. They were geniuses at spotting lights and darks and creating structure. I’m also very attracted to the work of Whistler, with his sense of design and delicate touch. As for writers, I’d have to say, Albert Camus and Joseph Conrad. Reading Camus early on had much to do with how I see life, and Conrad is just endlessly deep. If I could paint the way Conrad writes, I would die a happy man.

For a long time artist, you’ve gone through some surprising transformations. What lies ahead?

I have no idea. I’ll just engage with ideas and images that motivate me and let the brush take me where it will.

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