I give a lot of thought to why I take the pictures I take, and the only consistent answer I come up with is that something catches my eye. It might be a color, or a shape or the way the sun hits an object or throws a shadow. It might be that it reminds me of or represents something important in my past, or something that should be fixed in my future. In many (most?) cases, I don't fully grasp the meaning of a photo until I'm well into the creation process, and sometimes not until I'm asked to explain it. In the case of this picture, it was the sign above and to the right of the door. La Casa de Mi Abuela. And from this one thing, something more.
To my grandchildren I am Abi, short for Abuela, grandmother in Spanish. My grandmother's house was always a place of safety and comfort, and I would like for my house to be the same for my grandchildren. Leo Tolstoy said "art begins when a man, with the purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs".
But a picture of painted tiles would quickly lose its meaning. Without context, or composition, it would simply be boring. It would not impart any feeling, or experience, and it certainly wouldn't reflect any expression at all. So . . .
The door represents the means by which one enters that space of safety and comfort. In reality, it was brown like the door of my own grandmother's house. But in Santa Brígida, where the picture was taken, as throughout my travels in Gran Canaria, I noticed many doors painted green. Green is the color of growth, harmony and luck, and green doors are perceived as welcoming. It is, after all the thing that makes the first impression about you when someone arrives at your house. It tells people that your home is calm and tranquil, a sign of renewal and prosperity. This makes a lot of sense. So, when my photo processing software gave me the green instead of the brown (because I will forever believe that my art is, to a degree, accidental), I immediately stepped into this scene. I've done a bit of reading on Martin Heidegger's theory of gestalt, but I won't get into that here except to say that this idea of "being" took hold of me as I continued creating this image. More on Heidegger below.
The potted tree gave me the third element to represent harmony, completeness and unity. Perhaps no coincidence that harmony pops up again. Without any sun that day to create shadows, my only option to avoid distorting the scene was to place myself square on, which put the tree in front of the door, not obscuring it but rather providing some hint at depth. But there's no mistaking the loss of dimensionality in this piece which, it occurred to me, perfectly associates with any memory of my grandmother and the sense of loss I feel to this day. In reality, the tree was more green than purple. So, for the purposes of aesthetics, balance in the piece, I pulled out the purple and muted the green. A more superstitious person than I might see something other-worldly in the branches that seem to be reaching out to the painted tiles and the purple color which can signify peace (i.e. harmony), mystery and magic.
My passions in making art are firmly seated in the past--my interest in history, especially family history; my love of travelling to those places that have transcended time; my creative eye that sees colors muted, blemishes preserved, deterioration halted--so I will admit that I like aging my photographs, putting them back in the realm to which I believe they belong. The building is old, the walls are cracked and discolored, and I wanted to show this, but I also wanted to show the object itself, the photo, the work of art, placed back in a past time as well.
As promised: Heidegger said "art is historical, and as historical it is the creative preserving of truth in the work . . . art has a history in the external sense that in the course of time it, too, appears along with many other things, and in the process changes and passes away and offers changing aspects for historiology. Art is history in the essential sense that it grounds history."
What catches my eye, gets my attention is a spark of something more, something I need to explore, need to learn. Something I need to hold on to.
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