Three Ideas Surface to Create Swimming

Three Ideas Surface to Create Swimming

Three ideas surfaced and came together to create ‘Swimming on the Surface of the Sun’.

I had an already primed piece of board and started pouring and mushing paint, reds, yellows and gold.  Decided to pour some ebony wood stain on the acrylic to see what would happen.  Added some other solvents and watched the surface start to merge and crack and finally dry.

About the same time I was editing some photos I had taken with a small Fuji XP underwater camera.  Bodies swimming in a dimly lit pool.  There really weren’t any jellyfish in the pool.

Another project I have been working on is the scanning of negatives my father took when he was stationed in Japan shortly after the war.  He was a talented amateur photographer.  I have been scanning and archiving negatives he took for a long term project I’m working on ‘The Past Merging With Now: The integration of mid-century photography with current mixed media photo art’.  In this project i’m exploring the use of his mid-century more traditional photographs with my photo mixed media work.

These three projects came together in ‘Swimming On The Surface Of The Sun’.  The swimmer with jellyfish was applied to plexiglass using digital film transfer.  Scanned images of a diver taken in the late 40’s was applied to strips of silver leaf using digital film transfer.  A thin coat of fused encaustic was put on the surface.  Finally, the swimmer on plexiglass was distressed using a torch and screwed in place.