New paintings are on the site at http://focusdesign.com/art/docs/dec_1.htm
I've been looking a lot at photography lately such as that of Sally Mann and Eugene Atget. I love these photographers. I've been influenced/informed by photography as much as by painters. Actually, the single artist who has influenced me the most deeply is Joseph Beuys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Beuys who would not be considered a painter at all.
Sally Mann
Sally Mann's series, "Deep South", is really incredible, to my mind. Spooky, haunted and other-worldly beautiful. Very painterly and contemporary and of another time simultaneously.
Bio:
Sally Mann was born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia, where she continues to live and work. She received a BA from Hollins College in 1974, and an MA in writing from the same school in 1975. Her early series of photographs of her three children and husband resulted in a series called "Immediate Family.
In her recent series of landscapes of Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, and Georgia, Mann has stated that she “wanted to go right into the heart of the deep dark South.” Using damaged lenses and a camera that requires the artist to use her hand as a shutter, these photographs are marked by the scratches, light leaks, and shifts in focus that were part of the photographic process as it developed during the 19th century.
Book: "Deep South"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0821228765/002-8137948-2676063?v=glance&n=283155
Examples:
Eugène Atget
Bio:
Eugène Atget never called himself a photographer; instead he preferred "author-producer." A private, almost reclusive man, Atget first tried his hand at painting and acting, then began to photograph vieux Paris (Old Paris) in 1898. He photographed in part to create "documents," as he called his photographs, of architecture and urban views, but he supported himself by selling these photographs to painters as studies. Atget carried a large-format view camera, an outdated, cumbersome outfit, through the streets and gardens of Paris, usually photographing around dawn; many of these areas-storefronts and public spaces in nineteenth-century Paris and Versailles-were demolished soon afterward to make way for rapid urbanization.
Though Atget was not well known during his lifetime, his visual record of a vanishing world has become an inspiration for twentieth-century photographers. American expatriate photographers Man Ray and Berenice Abbott rescued his work from obscurity just before his death. Abbott preserved his prints and negatives, and was the first person to publish and exhibit Atget's work outside of France. Many existing prints of Atget's images were, in fact, made by Abbott in the 1930s from his negatives.
Book: "Atget"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0935112561/qid=1134069425/sr=1-10/ref=sr_1_10/002-8137948-2676063?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
Examples:
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