Create what you love and love what you create. That goes double for me with “Nude 1” because this is @adventuresoflina. Fine art nude pieces have been on my to-do list for years but I haven’t been ready to create them until now. As I’ve grown in art I’ve learned a few important lessons that helped me to create this piece.📸
1.) Create with purpose. I knew I couldn’t just shoot a beautiful, naked lady and call it art. I wanted more. The same has applied to my landscape photographs, too. I can’t simply point my camera at a pretty landscape and press the shutter, regardless of how skillfully I press it. There has to be a reason, the frame has to share my voice.
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2.) Inspiration is not created in a vacuum. If I sat in a dark room with my legs crossed and my fingers in a fancy pose my whole life I’d never have created anything. I might find my center, I might, but create from that place I will not. I learned that I need to gather inspiration then, more importantly, I need to curate it. Take only what I love from the works of others, compile them, dissect them, define their intangibles and then create only what I’ve discovered.
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I kick the podium on this topic every time it comes up in one of my classes. Finally- I’ve listened to my own advice. I take my inspiration for most of my work, especially the color and the light, from paintings. With Nude 1, I also gathered form and composition. My portrait inspiration for this piece and others to come comes from painters like Ruben, Botticelli, Giordana, Caravaggio, and more the more modern Acencio. Photographer inspiration comes from Erik Almas, Dan Hecho, Brooke Shaden, and may others.
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Just because I’m using a camera doesn't mean you need to make a photograph. This idea has been rattling around in my head for some time but didn’t really come together until I read it on a share from Brooke Shaden. In one of his tutorials Erik Almas said, “You don’t make a photo, you create it,” taking Ansel’s statement about “taking” a photograph versus “making” one one step further.
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When people see my landscapes they assume they are paintings. I take that as a compliment because it implies that they feel they are looking at art. Their assumption also implies that they don’t think of photography as art. In it’s purest form, photography is not art- it’s documentation. Photography is rarely practiced in it’s purest form, I’ve certainly never done it. Still, the consensus leans to photography being something apart from art. In Nude 1 I wanted to take a serious step away from photography and bring textures and abstract ideas into the frame with the dislocated cubes.
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For me, the end process is always the print. The print allows me to take one more step in the artistic process: actually painting on the finished print. Nude 1 will be a full-size portrait, printed on a heavy weight, molded art paper such as Hahnemuhle Museum Etching or other photo rag. I think 45” or more. I think I will finish the printed piece with a clear acrylic paint added by hand with brushes. The result being, hopefully, a piece of artwork that is not questioned for the tools of it’s creation but instead simply appreciated (or not) for it’s content.
Model: Angelina Aho @adventuresoflina