
Sensing Currents
This project is a fine art form-based photographic nature study on the ways trees and tree parts physically reach into the above ground spaces in which they live. It is primarily a study of the wonderful organic shapes of trees and tree parts and how they interact and create interesting formal relationships.
The plentiful supply of public parks and trails in a 30-minute radius around where I live in Tallahassee, Florida supplied the subject. And love of the forest and gaining visual acuity with its organic shapes supplied the why.
Methodology followed walking the forest trails and park fields with my DSLR primarily during morning and late afternoon hours near sunrises and sunsets searching for interesting formal relationships or scenarios. The approach in its beginning was about an continuation of my solo tree portrait work and initiated a vision or approach of seeking out isolated shapes like that of an outstretched human forearm and even whimsically visualized as that of a hand reaching to the sky clutching a chicken drumstick. As the project continued into more closed spaces under the canopy of the forest I found my approach following an expanded use of different formal concepts like space and line with shapes interacting and weaving in layers and entering the image from all sides of the frame. I found myself visualizing different shapes with a main emphasis on using forms akin to the tree and its root systems or like the shape of the bronchial tubes of the human lung. Further, I wanted to create a little tension with formal relationships not dependent on a level horizon or traces of ground, but instead on how each tree part and tree interacted and flowed vertically inside the frame.
The following photographers helped fuel my creative inspiration: Robert Llewellyn, Peter Essick, Lizzie Shepard, Chuck Hemard, Eliot Porter, Sean Kernan, William Eggleston and Richard Misrach among others.
The project is presented as 8x12 archival pigment color prints inside 13.5″ x 17.5″ box black oak .75” frames with 2” warm white matts on Hahnemühle William Turner Photo Rag.


