A Picture Exhibtion: Poetry in the Landscape

festina lente
Poetry in the Landscape
The illustrations presented in this exhibition are taken from familiar scenes and landmarks of my day-to-day world. Until I took the time to photograph them, I did not see their beauty; the poetry in the landscape was beyond my vision. For years I had looked and overlooked. How often are we surrounded by beauty we do not see?

May this gallery of light and color celebrate beauty overlooked.

DV
Winter 2010

Donald Vish is a lawyer, writer and photographer.

Information about the illustrations

Medium: Enriched digital photographs transferred to panels through the process of gas sublimation.

Method: Using a combination of view point, light, color and contrast, I transform ordinary digital photographs into atmospheric images in the manner of oil paintings, water colors, engravings, lithographs and impressionistic prints.

Artist’s Statement: By leave of the Muse and the assistance of my digital wand, I paint, engrave and preach with my computer and my camera.

No computer generated imagery is added to my photographs nor do I erase. I may crop, enlarge and distort but only through camera lens selection, vantage point, climate conditions and, occasionally, by use of digital tools which filter, blur or exaggerate. Consequently, my images are always true, not manipulated, although atmosphere, mood and point-of-view are injected, exaggerated or modified. Tone, geometric structure, shadow, peculiar optics, focal distortions, unusual perspective and soft focus are the techniques I use most often.

Sometimes I make pretty pictures of pretty places; sometimes I look for mood, tone and natural beauty. Some of my image processing techniques inject the surreal or impressionistic into the landscape; and sometimes my images use metaphor and irony to illustrate a point-of-view or provoke a reflection. All of my pictures are about light.

My work is never signed on the face of the image and when signed it is signed only with an imprint of my device, a dolphin entwined around an anchor over the Latin motto: festina lente, make haste slowly. On a case by case basis, I may provide descriptive and explanatory titles and commentary on the pictures but always separate from the image itself.

My artistic objectives are to furnish the viewer with a fresh perspective of the familiar, to reveal beauty in unlikely places, to find the celestial in the mundane, to see the music of color and to show the poetry of light and landscape. Each image aspires to help the viewer see something new in something old or something fresh in something familiar. In doing my work, I try to follow Ezra Pound’s injunction to poets: make it new.

About the Sublimation Process: (ChromaLuxe® by Unisub (a Louisville Company)).
A digital image is transferred to a scratch-resistant surface using sublimation inks printed by an Epson inkjet printer onto a carrier sheet, which is then placed onto the ChromaLuxe® panel blanks and cycled in a heat press. In the process, the image becomes a gas and is infused into the surface of the panel coating. The result is a glass-like, glossy (or matte) scratch-resistant finish. Panels imaged by this process are extremely high quality with vivid color reproduction and have a high perceived value. The image is ready for display without the need for additional matting, framing, or laminating operations.
DV/ March 1, 2010