DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

In drawing and painting I’m a realist, but in photography I lean towards abstraction.  I’m always looking for patterns that, put in a frame, become abstract paintings or sculptures.  It’s about striking patterns in shape, light, texture, or color, unusual simplicity or complexity, striking juxtapositions, or pictorial elements such as linearity or dynamic asymmetry occurring in the real world.  I have no need to go anywhere exotic to find such pictures.  They are everywhere around me in the busy city, and I only need the eye to spot them and a camera to collect them.  Here I’ll share a selection of finds, all photographed in the calendar year 2012 in New York City.

The details of old buildings are, of course, deliberate sculpture, but they can look different framed in context or removed from context and scale.

The structures of classical architecture stand in harmonious relation to biological nature.  Modern architecture is more concerned with physics: light and space.

Light is the magic ingredient of architecture, the special sauce that turns the most solid material and form into protean imagery.

Things that are more or less fixed exist in constant relation to things that are always changing.

It is the negative space, the holes in things and the gaps between things, that give form and meaning to matter.

People design things, but the ideas of the mind have a certain rigidity.  Chaos adds its wildness, and brings them to life.

Even light that is built rarely remains under tight control.

Look behind any surface and see further layers.

Mercury cycles quickly, and Saturn cycles slowly.  The world is cycles upon cycles upon cycles, all possible wavelengths combined.

Time makes a simple metal chair into a fractal forest.

The row of pinstriped buildings below seems at first glance a procession of uniform monoliths, but closer inspection shows that no  lines align perfectly.  This row is crooked like “yaeba” teeth.

Light and color make the dullest things dynamic, when you look at the light and color rather than at the things.

Contrasting qualities, rectilinear and organic, luminous and shadowy, exist in mutual distinction.

Complexity emerges.  Simplicity distills.