From: Sarah Van Keuren (svk@steuber.com)
Date: 12/08/00-08:08:14 AM Z
Don, thank you for your interest in the All Gum Show. As one of the
exhibitors, I thought I could use the statement I wrote as my comment on the
six prints that I sent to the Buckham Gallery. Hope this is helpful.
Sarah
Statement
These six prints are made from pinhole negatives that were exposed from
within or near to my living quarters in the year 2000. Although I had
resolved earlier to concentrate this year on composing digitally, using
elements from my vast supply of pinhole negatives accumulated during the
past ten years or so, I simply had to make new exposures when these scenes
presented themselves.
It is too soon to say why I found these views so compelling. Part of the
process of being an artist involves bringing the unconscious into
consciousness. There are times when I suspend reason and simply respond to
what moves me. Eventually, either a body of work accumulates around the
initial images and a point of view emerges, or no such body forms and the
early exposures become outliers.
I could say that I find equivalents of my own states of mind in these scenes
and that would be true. But at the time I was simply moved by the moments in
my environment when icicles hung from the roof like swords, or snow in April
turned azaleas into Chinese brush painting and took daffodils by surprise.
The poignant miracles of a blooming crabapple reaching to the sky in yet
another springtime, the vegetable garden reading like a tapestry of forms or
the surging topography of the summer landscape motivated me to capture on
film their flattened patterns as reflected by light.
My negatives are recorded on black-and-white 8 by 10 inch film and from them
I synthesize non-silver prints in color. On preshrunk rag paper I print a
skeletal rendition of the darkest values in cyanotype. Then I size the paper
with gelatin hardened in formaldehyde and build up my images in layers of
gum bichromate, reinforcing the cyanotype with Lamp Black and casting a veil
of warm transparent Ivory Black and selenium-like Neutral Tint into the
highlights. Other colors exposed into the prints convey subjective
interpretations and abstract predilections.
Sarah Van Keuren
October 30, 2000
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