Quatrain #37: Red, White, & Black

Teaching gradually became a natural extension, an overarching ethos, and an inherent objective of the quatrain project as each arrangement seeks to question one’s visual literacy skills — the core topic of my M.A. thesis. Any visual art requires a viewer to deconstruct, reconstruct, and interpret to determine meaning, and I frequently wonder about the people that don’t know how to see, decipher, and understand it. Can they understand the logos and pathos of a quatrain?

Quatrain #36: Line Wrangler

An original rule of the Quatrain Project was to post one quatrain per week for sixteen weeks. Over subsequent years the quatrain project took on a life of its own, and now there are close to forty that align with its original set of rules. Shortly after the first set of sixteen were completed, I realized that this was not just about producing a new body of work. I was also indirectly teaching some aspects of my creative process and visual literacy. The lines of seeing, thinking, and teaching are brought together to form a new whole. Visual poetry.

Quatrain #35: Transitionary Areas

The Quatrain Project is at six years now!

September 2011 represents a pivotal confluence of the post-modern and digital eras that inspired and enabled my intuition to capture visual vernacular, found objects, and lyrical quotidian moments. It was several years after the completion of a Master of Arts degree when I began to create these four-image constructions, called quatrains. My workflow requires sorting through thousands of images in post-production and selecting specific compositions to create fusions of semiotics and symbols that convey ideas and metaphors. What's next?

Quatrain #34: Quadrivium

Literally, a place where four roads meet. A quadrivium is also defined as being a course that was offered at medieval universities in which students learned the four mathematical arts: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

In virtually any photography course rudimentary forms of math are used to calculate exposure values with geometric sequences and fractions; composition & design strategies are routinely studied which are riven with simple principles of geometry; and the study of various forms of light reveal its spectral color properties, in addition to practicing observations of astronomic objects — the sun & moon are popular favorites. In regard to the music aspect, well that’s a form of poetry, so let’s equate that to the expression of all of these technical things that manifest in the visual poetry of photographs. To get to my point, a photography course easily meets and exceeds the definition of a quadrivium: interdisciplinary practices. 

Quatrain #33: Échelle Européenne

After taking a three-week tour to Europe recently, the perceptions brought home are multi-layered, and intricate. But most of all, what I think about is scale. I've been to big cities before, with big buildings, big spaces, and yes, sprawl as far as the eye can see, studded dense with urban constructs. There is something however that makes me blink and do a double take in Europe, and that's about the size of some the architectural specimens visible there. Even on 21st-century terms, those folks who designed and hewed were thinking big. No, strike that… I meant colossal. It is sublime to not only stand amongst these wonders, but to think of being part of the human family they have sung to for hundreds and in some cases, even a couple thousand years.