Art & Photography – Page 8 – Dietmar Tallroth

Forms

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

In case you wondered where the follow-up to the Notes on Composition post is. It will come, eventually. I am still thinking about it – and maybe too much so. It is a strange thing with creativity. Every time you think you are in the driver seat, creativity or your creative muse will kick you in the ankle and remind you that you follow her, not vice versa.

Coming back from a wonderful trip to the Indian Ocean I am still filled to the rim with new impressions and wonder about the manifold forms in nature. So I started to make a few pictures about the shells my wife and I collected at the beach (ah, ok I confess mainly my wife collected – I was more in a kind of dumb stasis trying to believe what I saw).

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Finnish Winter

February 11, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography

Among the seasons, winter could be arguably called the most Finnish one. Not because it would be the most beautiful. I’d be hard pressed to select one as the most beautiful one even though I have already admitted that I favor autumn most. No, I think winter is maybe the most varied of all the seasons.

Somehow, it feels this country was made for winter. Except, of course, for mid-summer, when again the midnight sun washes its crimson watercolors over the sky and a blue scent is woven into the air; the landscape is definitely also made for that.

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Notes on Composition I

February 5, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography

A beginning photographer can hardly evade advice on the question of composition. As reward, he/she is told, wait more pleasing photos. Usually then follows a list of rules (with immediate advice that rules sometimes need to broken), like the Rule of Thirds, the Rule of Odds, use of leading lines and so on. But is only goal for a photographer to always make pleasing photos? I don’t think so. Therefore, I believe it is a fair question to ask what we really want to achieve with composition.

If we try to understand what we mean by composition we find that at the most basic level, it can be described as arranging visual elements in a limited frame. I think the term “limited” is quite important here. Paintings and photographs always use some limited two-dimensional plane (a canvas, a film, a sensor) to place the picture. Even sculpture can be thought of as using a limited, but three-dimensional space.

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To be, or to make.

January 3, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography

Before starting on the series on composition that I announced in the previous post, let’s take a moment and look at another topic, the photographic process. Before any thoughts regarding composition or design come into play, the landscape photographer has already made a decision; he/she has selected a subject or scene.
How is that selection made? And why? These seem pretty fundamental questions in making a photograph, but often, artists stay very quiet about them. Why is that and what is going on?

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What is Art?

December 25, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

“You know it’s art, when it’s bigger than two metres and priced higher than five figures“. This quote attributed to British photographer Martin Parr nicely highlights not only Parr’s sense of humor, but also some of the friction between photography and the art market. The Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones in turn has become quite (in)famous among photographers as he regularly declares that photography is not art. This begs to revisit the old question: “What is art?”. Here is my attempt of an answer.

In the year 1917 Marcel Duchamp, with his work “Fountain”, declared a urinal as art. The sculpture was a Dadaists declaration of war on aesthetics and other forms of classification of art. Ironically, the work (or rather its later replicas) became an object of desire achieving prices in the millions at auctions. This has many concluding that art is what sells on the art market.

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Nature Deficit Disorder

December 7, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

A few days ago I found on the BBC website an article about “nature deficit disorder” (NDD for short). The term comes from a 2005 book by Richard Louv titled “Last Child in the Woods”. The condition is not strictly a medical one but a cultural one. Still, Louv sees it as a reason for increasing obesity, stress and decreased emotional wellbeing among children. Louv’s book triggered a number of nature education programs for children, aimed to have children practising outdoor sports, learn to name things they encounter in nature and take a scientific interest. That sounds all pretty good, doesn’t it? Yes it does, and still, there might be a fundamental misunderstanding at work.

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Taiko – Finnish Art Online

December 2, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Other artists

Yesterday a new webshop for Finnish art called “Taiko” opened to the public. The idea was born when the founders visited an artist that had hundreds of unsold works on stock. Any effort to make it easier for both the artists and the general public to find each other is already a laudable effort. After all, Finland is a small market and space for exhibitions is highly sought after. But the site is also very professionally and nicely done, including a feature to upload a photo from your living room to test how the work looks at the wall…

Works from over 250 artists are now on display. The selection has been curated and is of high quality. The range of works on display goes from paintings and graphics to (yes!) photographs and sculptures. And, as you are asking me already (cough), of course yours truly is there with (for now) ten photographs. That includes also the “Dragon” shown at the top of the post. Once I find the time, I might add some more works. So, if you are still looking for the little extra Christmas present, there is still time!

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A Young Master

November 23, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Other artists

In 2015 the small and courageous Amos Anderson Art Museum in Helsinki held an exhibition about China’s Changing Landscape – Contemporary Ink. It showed how modern Chinese artists (yes, there is more to China than Ai Weiwei) reinterpret classical Chinese working methods and motifs. While the whole exhibition had a freshness and energy that made some Western artists look tired and repetitive, it was one single work there that took me by storm.

Now, as you meanwhile know I don’t use hyperbole, except when I do, or are prone to superlatives, except when I am. But my bag of English adjectives doesn’t quite contain enough words of praise for this still relatively young artist from Shanghai. I think I spent almost an hour just in front of his work – that is a personal record.

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Format

November 17, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

dietmartallroth-0001 — The 5:4 Format – Late Autumn Coast, Berggrund, 2016

As soon as a photographer enters the weird and wonderful world of printing, he/she is in for a number of head-scratching experiences. Suddenly confronted with a plethora of paper sizes, frame sizes, mat (passepartout) opening sizes and aspect ratios one can get overwhelmed by these seemingly technical choices. It gets worse once he or she realizes that these are artistic choices as well. Let’s have a look.

Modern DSLR cameras follow the sizes and conventions of 35mm film, that means they produce pictures in a 1.5 (3:2) aspect ratio. Paper is sold in Europe in DIN-A sizes, which uses a 1.41 (√2) aspect ratio. Standard frame sizes are e.g. 30x40cm (1.33 aspect ratio), 50x40cm (1.25 aspect ratio) or 70x50cm (1.4 aspect ratio). If one uses a mat with an opening the standard openings are 29x19cm (1.52 – close enough to 1.5…), 39x19cm (1.34) etc.

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Mourning Leonard Cohen

November 11, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

This might be somewhat off-topic, but then maybe not. The news about Leonard Cohen’s death this morning have left me a bit shaken. When Dylan was announced winner of the Nobel Prize I thought that was well deserved; still I had to think that Cohen would have been an at least as worthy recipient of that prize as he has made poetry again tangible for a whole generation.

“Suzanne” was one of the anthems of my teenage years, a song that we listened to over and over again and that became part of our emotional fabric. We couldn’t really figure out what the song was about (even though “touching your body with one’s mind” sounds very appealing to teenagers). But what was the point with tea and oranges coming all the way from China, or what had Jesus being a sailor had to do with anything?

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