Publications

Seasons of the Mind

Limited edition of 300. 2 folios with 14 artworks each folio and an introduction page by Jaime Zobel.

"The work which I present here is a celebration of the world of color we inhabit.

It is a world outside of which life can hold every little meaning, because it is color which often marks both the bold and the subtle differences between various things. And they are these differences which in turn create remarkable tensions and patterns, bringing uniqueness as well as harmony, in the universe. This relationship between an object and its environment, or its neighbor, we call "meaning," which is intensified and complicated by color, as happens when a bright yellow chrysanthemum blooms against a deep red wall or when orange lichen forms on barren rock.

We inhabit an environment of color, and yet color also inhabits us, invades us, bewilders is with its infinite qualities and transformations. In a sense, color is nothing if not the emotional response it generates from us. The colors of the external world can find and evoke their internal analogues in us, in the way pale blue might pacify the troubles spirit , or green refresh the weary. Conversely, the absence of color can plunge us into a psychological abyss, or send us into a hall of opaque gray mirrors which show nothing back and lead nowhere.

More personally, I have chosen to celebrate color on behalf of those who cannot. Several years ago, a very dear member of my family was diagnosed to be with Alzheimer's disease. Without lingering on the great sadness this situation has brought upon all of us, I have been struck by how palpably and inexorably the sense of a person so dear are closing like airtight doors, leaving her in a void beyond our reach. It is as though her mind, once radiant, has passed on to a season of silence and darkness, perhaps forever.

Confronted by this circumstance, I have found myself redoubling my interest in creating, through my love for photography, a series of compositions of flowers. These compositions explore nature's marvelous ability to transform itself, revealing its many phases and faces, and our human ability, and gift, to be awed and moved by this process.

Pleased as I was by an exhibit entitled Flowers and Forms, I wanted to pursue this theme further, and proceeded to seleect certain photographs of flowers based on color and form. After sorting them out, I cut these photographs into strips of varying sizes. These strips I used to compose a new image, guided by nothing but my own notions of line, color and form. At the end of each process I expected to be able to tell if the work cohered or not, if it yielded pleasure or not. Sometimes, even deliberately I would use widely disparate colors and elements, quite often producing serendipitous results. Soon the project took its own logic, in the way that every artist is driven by a need at once perfectly understandable and yet perfectly mysterious, and I could see, in my final compositions, a record of my own transient states of mind. I felt that I had become privy to something the impressionist painters knew about making art by breaking th subject down into its component colors, but I hope to suggest, in these works, that the colors themselves can crete entirely new objects for conteplation, just as we are transformed by them.

There is, I will admit, some necessary violence in taking a flower photograph apart. But my motive has always been deconstructive rather than destructive, seeking in the end not a flower shop laid to waste, but a a garden of rare blooms, of fresh arrangements and unusual bouquets to surprise the heart and soul. " Jaime Zobel

Seasons of the mind