FLUIDISM 2011 -Chronicle Of Nature's Most Primitive Beauty
I turned hours of intense artistic exploration into a highly functional product.
A Thousand Shots Ago
I first realized the style of art I call “fluidism” as a painter. Detailed explanations of this style of art appear in my other hubpage articles:
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FLUIDISM - The Formal Naming Of An Informal Art
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FLUIDISM = Painting + Photography + Philosophy
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FLUID Is God
The short explanation is that fluidism started as a style of painting and later developed into a related style of photography. Fluidism ultimately developed into a style of thinking about life itself.
The important point of this article is that every photograph I snapped as a fluidism artist was NOT a winner. Every fluid dynamic event I orchestrated and observed was NOT beautiful. The complete chronicle of fluidism, therefore, contains quite a bit of ugliness – I have hundreds of color transparencies to prove it. I have chosen not to show any of these ugly moments.
Art for me has been about finding the beauty that exists side-by-side the ugliness. I have shown only my best images to represent fluidism. I have recently chosen twelve of these best images to use in a wall calendar that I am making available for public sale for the first time.
To get these twelve best images, I had to shoot over a thousand pictures. Out of this thousand pictures, I chose about forty images that I considered suitable for such a project.
Trial, Error And Judgement
During any given photo session, I routinely endured tedious trials and errors. I shot a picture, made a critical judgment, reframed the scene, and shot more pictures. After I got the slides developed, I spent many more minutes over several days re-examining all the images until I was thoroughly convinced that one or two or three images stood apart from the rest. Sometimes none of the shots seemed outstanding, and I had to accept a dead shoot (i.e., zero success).
Self-criticism and self-editing, thus, were absolutely essential to the process. Previous successes did not guarantee future successes – I always had to start again, as though I had never done any of this before. Judging from positive responses I have received, I seem to have made a few good artistic decisions.
My most recent effort has been to extend good artistic decisions to producing an attractive, practical product. The result of this effort is as follows:
