Flowering Fields
Flowering Fields © Roberta Murray
The other day Robert Genn wrote about finding your artist’s voice. It was an interesting subject which I have been spending a bit of time with for the past several months. When I was first told my work lacked direction I was really taken aback. To me, my focus was pretty clear and I just couldn’t understand why anyone would want artist’s to fit their work into a narrow focus. Wouldn’t that be akin to working in a box? Isn’t the point of being an artist creativity and experimentation? How does that fit with being focused? To me being focused meant everything you produced looked pretty much the same. Long exposure B&W photos of ocean pilings. Bright coloured photos of flowers. Gritty street scenes in which one person looks pretty much the same as the next. How boring to produce same over same over same.
In: Creativity · Tagged with: canola, farm, field, pinhole
Website Update
Heart and Tears © Roberta Murray
I have completed a major website revision. As time goes on my focus is becoming more defined. My art is very much a work in progress which is subject to the changes and revisions that go with it. I have abandoned trying to segment the subjects of my photography and am instead focusing on the pictorialist nature of the images and how all the previous subject related themes (the land, the plants, the animals, the people) play into the overall story of my life, dreams, and nightmares. I hope that it will make my work seem more cohesive and relevant. I have broken the images down into color work and black and white images, of which I wish to produce more of. I’ve also included an area to show newer work, which should make future updates a little less onerous.
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In: Site Updates · Tagged with: portfolio, redesign, website
Pictorialist Photography
Country Scene © Roberta Murray
I had been developing my particular style of photography for a few years before it was pointed out how similar my work was to the Pictorialist photographers of times past. Before then I had not even heard of Pictorialist’s. Surely I would have had some introduction to their work through my prior studies in photography. I recognized the names of such noted photographers as Alfred Stieglitz, William Henry Fox Talbot and Henry Peach Robinson, but only as being a part of photographic history. I would have seen some of these early images, but was uneducated into the whole history surrounding them and the photography movement in which they worked.
In: The Subject of Art · Tagged with: art, cows, history, pasture, pictorialist photography
