Kyle’s Work – Page 6 – Kyle Clements

Illuminated Landscapes: Single Focus

As I mentioned in an earlier post, organizing and picking a select few images out of hundreds of photographs can be a daunting task.

Our first method consisted of going through the folder in waves, sorting the pictures into separate folders: Bad, OK, Good, Better Best. This left us with a very disorganized and inconsistent collection in our “Best” folder, so we changed our approach. We picked a theme, and selected the images that were the best fit for that category.

We found it helpful to sort the photos into several groups of similar images.

None of these category titles appear in the book, since text was kept to a minimum.

Instead, I will sort these images right here, in a series of blog posts.

This folder was titled “Single Focus”, and the shots in this folder made liberal use of the shallow depth of field our f1.8 lenses made possible.
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A Whole Lotta Blog Love

Half of being an artist is what takes place outside the studio. No one is going to randomly knock on my apartment door, just to see if an interesting artist happens to be living there. Marketing and promotion matter!

The most labour-intensive project I have been involved with to date is my collaborative project with Brad Blucher, Take a Picture

A few days ago, I was talking to my friend Jonathan (a maker of fantastic things) and he suggested that I try submitting Take a Picture to the Make Blog and Hack a Day.

Long story short, this was wonderful advice, and it started a snowball rolling, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

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Writing a New Artist Statement

Oh, artist statements.

I’ve written about my dislike of writing artist statements before. Writing about another’s work is easy, yet writing a one-page blurb about my own work is incredibly difficult.

As the creator of the work, it is easy to become infatuated by the small details, and miss the bigger picture. When looking at my work, the things I notice and really work on are very minute details. The larger ideas are things I’ve been working with for so long, I don’t even notice them any more. The old expression, “can’t see the forest for the trees” comes to mind.

There is a saying among artists that describes this feeling, “I’m too close to the work.”
When talking to fellow artists, we know exactly what this phrase means. I recently had the awkward experience of explaining that phrase to a non-artist. “It’s hard to see my work from a detached perspective because I spend so much time with it up close, I can’t think of it objectively”.

That’s when I had an idea, “If it’s easier to write about someone else’s work, why don’t I get someone else to write about my work?”.
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Illuminated Landscapes: Abstract

As Brad and I were organizing the images for inclusion in Illuminated Landscapes, we were initially intimidated by the large number of images before us. We found it helpful to sort the photos into several groups of similar images.

We each came up with a few general categories. The working titles for these groups were pretty bad, it was just the first thing that popped into our heads, nothing too deep or poetic, but the idea to sort them like this was a tremendous help.

A single folder with 200 images can be very overwhelming go through, but when I had 10 folders with 20 images in front of me, I stopped seeing the image as isolated things; I began to see them as part of a series. This made sorting much easier. It wasn’t about the image any more, it became about what images worked best together. What could have been days of beard scratching was reduced to a few hours of work.

We didn’t title any of the sections in the book, since we decided to keep text to a minimum. Other than the opening blurbs, this is just about images. No captions or quotes; just text.

Over the next little while, I plan on using this place to present the groups of images.

I will start with a group of photos that is pure Kyle; not one of Brad’s shots made it into this folder. This folder was simply titled “Pollock”, and when you see the images, the reason for this name should be fairly obvious.
Continue reading Illuminated Landscapes: Abstract

Illuminated Landscapes Has Arrived!

Last night, the first copy of Illuminated Landscapes arrived in my mailbox, and I am proud to say that the book passed it’s inspection. The print quality matches our expectations and the project is now officially ready to go live!

It’s kind of strange to think that I now have a book out and on the market.

I don’t have a lot to say with this post; instead, I will offer a virtual tour of the book.
Continue reading Illuminated Landscapes Has Arrived!

Illuminated Landscapes: Free PDF Version Available Now.

If you are a regular here, then you’ve probably heard about Illuminated Landscapes a series of photographs by my friend Brad Blucher and myself.

I’ve hinted about the project three times before. But no more vague teasers!

We’ve edited down the huge archive of images into 80 photographs. These 80 photographs will appear in our new 80-page photo book Illuminated Landscapes, which will be available soon.

While we are still waiting for the hard copy version to arrive so we can apply our seal of approval and put the thing up for sale, the free digital version is available now!

That’s right, the free version is out before the “must pay for it” version!

The free digital version contains the same set of 80 images that appear in the physical version, and is presented as two separate PDFs. (one portrait, the other landscape)

To receive your free version of Illuminated Landscapes, all you need to do is send off an email to:
smile_takeapicture@ymail.com

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Illuminating Landscapes

On Saturday night, I stumbled through the front door at 4:02am.

I wasn’t returning from a night of hard partying. I wasn’t stumbling due to any sort of intoxication. I was simply exhausted, both mentally and physically.

Why was I so exhausted?
Well, 18-hour work days will do that to ya.

Since 10:00 am Saturday morning, Brad and I had been working on a little project. We call it “Illuminated Landscapes.”

I talked about the very first photo shoot of this series in a previous entry, Painting with Light, but I didn’t explain what we were going to do with these images.

This is what we’ve been working on:
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Artist’s Statement Hell

I’ve got a big show that I will be applying for in the near future.
I’ve known about this show for over a month, but I still haven’t sent in my application.
Why haven’t I sent in my application?

Well, the last few years, they’ve wanted some jpegs, and a copy of my CV, a list of my show history.
This time around, they aren’t interested in my history.

Oh no.

This time around, they want an artist’s statement.

Oh, artist’s statements, how I wish you did not exist. I have yet to come across a single artists who is thrilled at the prospect of writing an artist’s statement. Some artists hire others to write their statements for them, some hack something together last minute, and some over-think and over-work their statements to the point where they have a tangled incoherent mess of invented undictionaried words.
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The Painting Process: Captured on Video

As a painter, I’m very interested in the painting process.

Painting is what I do, and I have to go through a painting process to get the finished painting. Whole movements and styles of painting have been dedicated to the process of painting. As much as I love abstract expressionism, I really, really don’t like the term “process painting”. I don’t walk into a gallery to see the verb form of painting; I’m after nouns. I want to see a well-executed finished piece.

Eventually, I will post a rant about my dislike of the phrase “process painting”, but this is no that occasion. On this occasion, I will be talking about what I think is a much better way of capturing and exhibiting the process of painting. I will be talking about video.
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The Importance of Failure

It’s easy to be discouraged by failure. It’s easy to do your best to avoid failure. But failure is a necessary part of learning. If you aren’t teetering on the verge of failure, you aren’t pushing yourself far enough.

When I sign up to do an art show, it’s often done a year in advance, I send in images of my older work, and when I’m accepted, I’m locked in, I have to produce a certain amount of new work that is similar to the examples that got me into the show. And when you sign yourself up for as many shows as I did last year, it’s a challenge to produce enough work for each of these shows. I had nine shows last year, many of them overlapped, meaning I had two full bodies of work on display simultaneously. I’m not a factory. I can’t just pump out X number of units each month. I like to give each piece the time and attention it deserves. Sometimes that only takes a few days, and sometimes it takes several months.

Continue reading The Importance of Failure