Abstract

"Grain"

ARTIST STATEMENT

For this image I was looking for something that the viewer would question. Something that would leave the reaction "What is that?" And I did just that with this image. I first tried to take a picture of corn we have in a jar at our house and when that didn't work, I tried a cup full of toothpicks. Neither were working out separately so I put them together. I liked how good the corn looked in a large quantity so I decided to fill the cup with those and try to make a design with the toothpicks.

I thought that the ring around the top of the cup would make a good focal point so I centered it and took the image from above to get just the top. I added the rest of the corn around the base of the focal point so that it wasn't just against a black background and because it added another interesting part to the photograph. I made this image black & white for 2 reasons. 1 is because corn and wood have a very similar color so changing the photograph to black and white reduced the overwhelming monochromatic feel. The 2nd reason is that I am a big fan of shadows, that's what I like black and white so much. The corn and toothpicks both cast really intriguing shadows and those needed to be highlighted.

If I could fix this image up I'd mainly want to fix the blurriness. I like most aspects of it and I actually like how the corn in the background doesn't perfectly fit in the screen. Along with shadows, I like how an image shows imperfections such as that design. Nothing is perfect, even when you make it.