Scenic Route

April 7, 2020 | By Steph Hargrove

Scenic Route

I have successfully completed my surprise side project – a photography series for the upcoming Creative Pinellas Emerging Artists virtual show. Since coronavirus has delayed our physical show opening at the gallery, these photographs feature the 2,511 seashells that were collected and painted for my large installation piece. Even though I’m pretty impatient when it comes to sharing new work <nervously taps foot>, I’m keeping the photos under wraps until the virtual show opens on May 14th. However, I will share some behind the scenes info with you.

First, I should tell you that the name of the installation is…

As I’ve mentioned before, 2,511 seashells will (eventually) be installed in the Creative Pinellas gallery to represent a statistic involving clean water in the state of Florida. Following that theme, I have created a series of nine photographs <fights urge to post images> with these titles:

While I didn’t actually use all 2,511 shells at the same time in the photography series, I did have to lug all of them outside for the photo shoot:

Fun fact: This is my WTF face. I was checking my phone for a photograph that tells me the correct order of the 13 shell colors to create an ombre effect. Yeah, even though I decided on that order months ago and have built it at least 20 times on my studio table, I still had to check. WTF.

I will also share that I used four color schemes and three patterns to create the nine photographs in the series. Both myself and my husband Jason took hundreds of images <OMG this is killing me not to share at least ONE> over the course of five days. We shot in four different spots around our home.

I hope you’re excited to see the finished series in the virtual opening! I’m just a little excited. 😉

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