Lacombian Shadows
Ellsworth Kelly taught me how to see shadows and the reduced negative spaces. If it wasn't for the "La Combe" works, I wouldn't have done these:
http://www.photography.leebarry.net/lacombian-shadows.html
Inspired by:
In another conceptual piece "Architectural Synecdoche", the flattened shadows of a stairway railing on stairs made me see the shadow as a possible floor plan for an "Ellsworth Kelly Museum" (even though he has his Chapel). Very often looking at art will make you see the world differently.
http://www.art.leebarry.net/architectural-synecdoche.html
Memories of the images within the paintings began to surface as I saw them in the world. For example, there were several paintings with pillar or column-shaped objects, that when I saw on a stairway railing, reminded me of the paintings. Surrealism was intimately connected with the unconscious mind expressed in dream images, and here they work in the same way as dreams do, surfacing in active memory at random moments.
***
Post-script:
When one sees light boxes and various other fabricated displays in retail, it reminds us of the circularity between art-for-art's-sake and things that look like it--and the banality and brilliance of that idea. (No one in retail probably would never have ever heard of Donald Judd.)
In the 18th-century, artists would make paintings in the presence of a master original, noting that the work was done "touched in the original", and blessed with its power. Not that Judd or Dan Flavin come anywhere near that power, they certainly connected the threads to the past, as Flavin did with Tatlin for example. It's interesting that Ellsworth Kelly re-contextualized shadows in the photographer's eye--from photo to abstract painting back to a photo.
http://www.photography.leebarry.net/lacombian-shadows.html
Inspired by:
In another conceptual piece "Architectural Synecdoche", the flattened shadows of a stairway railing on stairs made me see the shadow as a possible floor plan for an "Ellsworth Kelly Museum" (even though he has his Chapel). Very often looking at art will make you see the world differently.
http://www.art.leebarry.net/architectural-synecdoche.html
Something similar happened after seeing Magritte's "L'art de la conversation" at the Art Institute.
Memories of the images within the paintings began to surface as I saw them in the world. For example, there were several paintings with pillar or column-shaped objects, that when I saw on a stairway railing, reminded me of the paintings. Surrealism was intimately connected with the unconscious mind expressed in dream images, and here they work in the same way as dreams do, surfacing in active memory at random moments.
(When reality reminds you of works of art, then you know you've made a connection).
I finished this minimalist piece "Lvolution" the day he died, not realizing he had passed, and most definitely inspired by him.
***
Post-script:
When one sees light boxes and various other fabricated displays in retail, it reminds us of the circularity between art-for-art's-sake and things that look like it--and the banality and brilliance of that idea. (No one in retail probably would never have ever heard of Donald Judd.)
In the 18th-century, artists would make paintings in the presence of a master original, noting that the work was done "touched in the original", and blessed with its power. Not that Judd or Dan Flavin come anywhere near that power, they certainly connected the threads to the past, as Flavin did with Tatlin for example. It's interesting that Ellsworth Kelly re-contextualized shadows in the photographer's eye--from photo to abstract painting back to a photo.
