For the past couple of years I’ve begun drifting away from the literal and heading for the lyrical. I am finding myself easily bored with well-lit (and even colorful) images. I find myself longing for the qualities a painters brush stroke brings to a portrait. I have experimented a great deal with using multiple exposures or projectors to add layers of texture and distortion to my images. Though I made images I was happy with, they didn’t feel like they were close enough to where I was wanting them to go.
I began searching for old sheets of glass on the internet, something Erwin Blumenfeld would be proud of. The more I searched for the perfect sheet of translucent texture, the more I began to realize that I should probably bring the texture to the glass instead. I ransacked my pantry, settling on honey and coconut oil, for ingredients to use in my trial run.
The oil was the easiest to work with since it isn’t sticky and stays in place. It also holds the texture of the application rather well. The honey drips rather quickly, which can be problematic, but great thing about honey is that it refracts light. The level of refraction varies based on how thick the honey is layered and whether or not I dab it to add texture. I’m really excited to see where these experiments take me.
