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Rangefinder
Magazine Heart Art by Larry
Singer Let’s start out with a one-question trivia quiz. Don’t worry, there’s no penalty for a wrong guess. Ready?
What famous person said, “Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.” Was it (a) Charles Manson, (b) Ansel Adams, (c) Albert Einstein or (d) Madonna? You have five seconds to think about it; starting—now! That’s it. Time’s up. If you picked Mr. E = MC2, congratulations. I chose this particular quote by Mr. E is because I am a teacher and former professional photographer who has developed an overpowering obsession with creating hearts. I had a hunch that hearts were somewhat popular symbols when I began using Photoshop Elements 2.0 to paint them on my computer. I only recently discovered, however, exactly how popular hearts (compared to other body parts) are, when I found about 125,000 different representations of our cardiac pump on Google, and only 17,500 drawings and photographs of the brain. I have been a photojournalist since 1970. During this time, I did my best to capture my own subjective reality as objectively as possible on film.
Now, by using my photography as a point of artistic origin, I disassemble and scramble the original information on my film and CD and reassemble it as abstract designs in the shape of highly textured and patterned, multihued hearts. This adventure in Heartland began in the summer of 2002 when I discovered some of the creative possibilities made available by liquifying the light illuminating the photographic images on my computer screen (filter > distort > liquefy) and then moving it like oil paints on canvas. numerous minutely detailed, psychedelic abstracts that were visually fascinating, enormously self-gratifying and heartbreakingly unmarketable. One overly harsh amateur art critic even had the brazen nerve to refer to them as “ wallpaper.” I then decided I would, sooner or later, create abstract art that people who have little appreciation for abstract art, would really like. Fortunately, after nine creatively frustrating months, an unexpected event collided head on with my karma and flipped my running-on-fumes career as an artist into a lane headed in a whole new direction.
This life-altering epiphany occurred during one of my daily, and normally uneventful, telephone chats with my mother. During this conversation she told me about a brush and canvas artist who not only loved but also captured the beauty in baked goods and became famous and successful by limiting his creative output to images of pastry. When I began this latest round of experiments, I inadvertently reactivated a longforgotten sketching skill honed many years ago in high school study hall. There, over a four-year period, I doodled endless variations of hearts onto the cover of my threering binder as artistic expressions of unrequited, hormonal teen lust. Today, many, many years later, I find myself possessed with the burning desire to create breathtakingly unforgettable hearts that would captivate even the most severe New York art critic. To this end, I began experimenting with a number of preexisting pictures to see what combinations of colors and shapes in my original photograph produced hearts that I felt were esthetically pleasing. I discovered bright, colorful subjects and patterns streaked with red, gold and blue consistently work well.
Experimenting constantly, I also discovered new effects by further altering both the hearts and their backgrounds by playing mix and match with the lasso tool and glass, wave or other Photoshop filters. I might use the plastic wrap filter to give just part of a heart a wet look or cover just the valleys of a heart with frosted glass. I occasionally use the cutout filter to reduce the distraction of a bothersome background or completely change its color. I also spent a long time playing around with the brush pressure and brush size to learn to get both subtle and dramatic effects when liquifying my pixels. I learned the hard way that if I want to make some dramatic changes to a preexisting heart, it is vital to duplicate said heart as a backup before I begin experimenting. Any colorful subject is fair game as a possible future heart. I’ve used, among many other found objects—fountains, fruit, vegetables, flowers and self-portraits to make my hearts. Each heart is an experiment. Because they constantly change and evolve, collectively they are now, and probably will always be, works in progress. My primary driving force is the sense of accomplishment I get by melting light and reshaping it into illusions that shimmer and glow in every color of the spectrum, and the enjoyment I get from looking at the results. The author of the first self-help book on photography I ever read believes the only proper guidelines for judging the quality of a work of art with any degree of objectivity are originality, insight and technical excellence. With these three guideposts as a framework, every time I begin shaping a new heart, I make a conscious attempt to produce art that I hope will get high marks from everyone who sees it, in all three categories. Because legions have decorated, collected and contemplated hearts for centuries, I can only hope I too am creating something with a long shelf life. After all, it was no less a master of brilliant thought and eternal truths than William Shakespeare who once stated, “A light heart lives long.” I hope that he was right. Larry Singer lives in South Florida. “Just Hearts” in Delray Beach, Florida is currently featuring and marketing his hearts. He has three online displays of his work. To see more of his art, or to contact him, go to: http://homepage.mac.com/larrysinger/Photo Album5.html/. How To Paint a Heart The Rules: Not Rocket Science I can tell you what tools I use, but how you use them and the order in which you choose to use them, is what will determine how happy you are with the results. I play around with as many filters and color effects as possible. The trick is actually feeling like you are making headway in eventually controlling a program blessed with an infinite number of variables. Just the Facts My only clear goal at this point is to create something beyond the bounds of traditional photography. I usually begin with a bright and colorful image of some object, like a glowing red vase backlighted by the morning sun or a box filled with a rainbow of incandescent artificial flowers. My first stop is the Liquefy filter (Filter > Distort > liquefy). I select a brush size and brush pressure on the right hand side of the liquefy screen. Then I use the warp tool at the top of the vertical tool bar on the left side of the screen to start pushing the pixels of the primary object in my picture into the shape of a heart. As I push the heart into shape, I also shape the background into a pattern that will hopefully compliment the heart. When I have the heart and background shaped the way I want, I hit the “OK” button. I’ll then usually take the lasso tool, encircle the heart, and, while toggling back and forth between heart and background using the Inverse tool (select > inverse), alter my image using the tools under Enhance and the multitude of creative Filters. When I create a heart I’d like to have hanging on my wall, I save it. The next day, and the day after that, the image will be adjusted and readjusted. With my hearts, the experiment is ongoing. |
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