I recently declared that I was done with vessels—I was moving on! Mainly, I don’t want to repeat myself, and I’m interested in a lot of other directions.
But none of that matters, because, as it turns out, I just have to keep doing what I am interested in. Otherwise, what is the point? So somehow, here I am again—shooting more vessels. As the gallerist Brian Clamp recently reminded me, there is nothing wrong with having a theme.
I just hope that I am truly getting better and going deeper, not just making the same image over and over again, in ever more refined terms. To me, this image has a hint of a clumsy archeology display and/or explanatory literature, where so much is conjecture.
I feel pleased with this picture, but it didn’t come together instantly. It was the result of weeks of experimenting with a ‘basket’ form. I saw this very cool basket at the textile show at MOMA a while back, it was a very loose weave so that the form seemed to be to be a special kind of air basket. A vessel with indistinct boundaries, maybe. The artist is Ed Rossbach, but I am only interested in his basket, below, not his other work. It was also the only object in the show that could have been an artifact in basic archeological sense.
by Ed Rossbach
Some of the experimentation involved drawing the basket several times, then shooting the drawing in various ways and more. You can see some of it here in the sketchbook page, below, along with an early version of the orbit paths image I have been working on.
