Lineage of Light

Impressionism coalesced formally in 1874 with Claude Monet’s ill-received avant-garde paintings.

Lacking preciseness and the figuration expected by his contemporary critics, Monet had methodically blended his conscious perception of a scene with the physical ephemerality therein.

Rhythmic hues and interplaying patterns all imbue Monet’s brushstrokes: signifying the aesthetic sensations of a finite setting while making permanent their once-continuous flux.

A decade later, in the 1880s, Étienne-Jules Marey engineered the capability to capture select chronologies — birds in flight, horses galloping, humans walking — using solitary photographic plates.

The result is a complex image comprised of multiple moments, solidified as a singular visual narrative.

Breaching the 20th Century, in 1912 Marcel Duchamp depicted that preceding Mareyistic movement in a static, painterly form — expressing a flow of unappreciated motions that compose a common experience: walking down a set of stairs.

Duchamp’s painting also happened to appear during the early era of paradigm-displacing redefinitions of space, time, and classical gravity; that is, amid the publications of, and dynamic debates over, Albert Einstein’s theories of Relativity: themselves preempting the emergent mist of indeterministic Quantum Mechanics.

In/out of the 1940s, Jackson Pollock shifted his technique by action-painting in his proximate airspace: his movements expressed in geometries of color: his innate nature turned external.

Entropy seemingly ceases in his canvas-based spacetimes: realms limited yet expansive — in which time desists and space always seethes.

The energy of Nature manifested as Pollock himself, and Pollock instinctively communicated that energy for assimilation and conscious reflection by the viewer.

Throughout Dave’s photography — notably, Light – relativistic transformations manifest inside Euclidean boundaries. While impressionistic, one could assert as well that the images are expressionistic, being born and crafted by intention.

Unseen perspectives that construct reality are therefore extracted: by mixing stylized movements, experimental camera-settings, and strategic compositions: echoing a sentiment of Duchamp who had sought the “static representation of movement.”

All images in Light are photographed and not digitally designed, filtered, or photoshopped — for the world in fact subsists in these seized expressions, were each of us able to accelerate our relative frames-of-reference.

In addition to a subject in motion, the composition itself is mobilized; the background, foregrounded.

The advent of photography initially challenged the purpose of painting: Why employ paint to depict a scene when one could “accurately” reveal the real with the use of a camera?

Yet humanity has learned, over the last century especially, that absolutely all natural phenomena operate by way of fundamental quantum-mechanical inconstancy — resonating almost immeasurably at the heart of our classical Newtonian experience.

Consequently it may be said that Realism is the more illusory — and Impressionism, realistic.

The paintings of Monet (the pointillism of Georges Seurat, et al.) arguably arrive at the real more authentically than “accurate” static-subject paintings. Even most historical and contemporary photography, from still-life to portraiture to landscape, technically fail to represent the true nature of Nature.

Light in turn brings out reality as it is — beneath its macroscopic veneer.

And so the fusing of foreground and background into a coalescent, kaleidoscopic fabric reveals optically how our existence really is: wild, turbulent, and rationally wondrous.

[1] Monet – Impression: Sunrise – 1872 @ The Musée Marmottan, Paris

[2] Marey – Geometric Chronophotograph of the Man in the Black Suit – 1883

[3] Duchamp – Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 – 1912 @ The Philadelphia Museum of Art

[4] Pollock – Lucifer – 1947 @ Stanford University, Anderson Collection

[5] DSF – Untitled – ©2019