Re: All Gum Show online exhibit

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From: Don Bryant (dsbryant@worldnet.att.net)
Date: 12/11/00-10:03:11 PM Z


Sarah,

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my request for your comments about
your work.

After reading your comments, I reflected for a few minutes about my own work
and approach and I found that I could concur with some of your statements.
Your eloqunce of expression was poetic yet pointedly descriptive.

> 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.

What size are the original negatives?

> 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 find that sometimes I have to put work away for a while before it is clear
to me what I should concentrate on printing. Self editing is difficult for
me because at times my concepts and subjects stem from fuzzy thinking. But
eventually a strain of work seems to appear like different veins of ore.
Digging out the ore is at times the hardest part.

> 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.

Again you are the poet and quite apropos!

>
> 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.

Can you explain this a little? A high contrast cyanotype with thin
highlights?

>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.

So at this point you have you have two or three gum coats with different
tints?

Thanks,

Don Bryant


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