In learning to draw, one learns to see. An artist must become an accomplished observer of detail, then be brave and bold to put it to paper, pen sometimes quivering in hand. the rewards are much more than artwork, for the Universe not noticed before appears in your line of vision in all of its wonder and glory. It was there all the time, waiting for you to see it. Now, start drawing"
"To paint is to love, and to love is to live again." Henry Miller

Using the impermanent medium of Jell-O , Liz Hickok creates glowing, jellied scale models of urban sites. Hickok changes the massive and seemingly unmovable city structures into something unexpected and ephemeral, commenting on the fragile nature of our cities. While the photographs evoke strange imaginary landscapes, the installations introduce a physical and sensory experience. The sculptures eventually decay, leaving the photographs and videos as the only record of their existence.

 These images are photograms that were exposed by the light of the full moon, hence the term “lunagram.”  Using vintage discontinued gelatin silver paper, I created my Lunagrams with found plant life collected on land in a remote area of the Sierra Foothills, where a beautiful creek supports a wide diversity of flora. Since the closest city is over 30 minutes away, the light of the full moon is the only illumination that can be detected in the dead of the night.  This creates an ethereal presence on the rich vintage paper that I use to craft these images.

My fine art work consists primarily of landscape and cityscape images drawn from the Bay Area and throughout the West. A few of the pieces are semi-abstracts derived from some of the more naturalistic captures. For my San Francisco Twilight Series plus other SF scenes please see http://molephoto.com/wordpress1/galleries/san-francisco/

i shoot film.

i believe in the richness of the result.

manipulating and altering the image doesn't ring my bell.

each picture has it's own terroir. it's not just place. it's light, mood, subject, weather, the critical moment.

i care that you see it as i saw it. not as i want you to see it after the computer has messed with it.

no effects, no fuss, no intervention.

Hiking, photographing and sketching from the Rockies West is the best of nature and adventure visuals--texture, shape, sun, shadow, color. The endless geologic and natural images capture me. No recreated image approximates the scale and intricacies of rock, erosion, water, or weather in light and shadow. My effort in the studio to is to recapture a portion of that infinite magic. Additional paintings and photographs are visible on my flickr account at http://www.flickr.com/photos/et-highway/sets/

Each person experiences the world in their own way, making truth subjective. My artwork is a visual representation of my truth, through my eyes and experiences. The pieces all start off with an initial idea but always grow into whatever they were meant to be. I don't attempt to depict the world as we see it. My work is about letting my little intrigues tempt you into my world of lies.

I began painting my sense of an inner light shortly after my step-grandson, Michael, died at the age of 9.  Standing at his bedside, I watched this child take a breath that was not followed by another.  With that last exhalation, something slipped away, something more than a heartbeat, something more than a lungful of air, and during the weeks, the months that followed Michael's death, I found myself, in essence, trying to paint the light, the spark that ignites each of us.  Stripping away the physical, I began painting landscapes within small pieces of wood, which were inhabited by singular orbs of light, though occasionally more than one inhabitant appeared.  The idea of the body as husk arrived in the work at some point, but the orb continued as an underlying theme.  Orb became object (orb-ject) and then the object became luminescent again.

As one who believes there is no light without dark, I am drawn to creating low-lit spaces.  Light seeps into my images, paintings and photographs, pouring through doorways, falling from the sky, defining, illuminating, showing up indirectly as reflections or as the absence of, as in shadows or silhouettes.

Years later, light still draws my attention.   I find myself once again exploring the variations of light, as seen in this on-going body of work, Emanations, Reflections and Diffusions.

Andréa D. Guerra