I've always loved nature - it's immense diversity of shapes, colors, patterns and its unpretentious honesty. For me, it speaks of joy, love, peace, truth. I have long tried to capture some of that in photographs.
Around 1988, I attended a benefit showing of a photographic artist in Dallas, Texas who not only took considerably better photos than I, but also created stunning art by mirror-imaging the photos which somehow captured nature's beauty in extravagant depth. The artist was a friend of a friend and I have, most unfortunately, forgotten her name. Her art, however, has stuck with me. I began my own artistic journey in imitation of it. I took some of my photos of rocks and trees and landscapes and created mirror-imaged designs. I fell in love with the amazing and unintended shapes and patterns and meanings that happened at the interstices of the mirror images. So then I tried mirroring the mirror images and found more shapes and patterns and meanings. I flirted for awhile with tessalations and fractal designs and then another friend gave me a book on quilts that set me off in another direction.
Kaleidoscopes & Quilts by Paula Nadelstern (C&T Publishing, 1996) highlights an approach to quilting which involves piecing together differently patterned and colored fabrics in complex and stunning kaleidoscope patterns. I decided to do the same with the patterns of nature. So I began creating designs that involved piecing together different photographs and then mirroring the result 5, 6, 8 ,9 or 12 times. Now there were interstices everywhere. Every design had a direction but the finished work imposed its own patterns. A miracle that seemed to have little to do with me and my artistic sense and more to do with nature's own creative spirit.
I still love that miracle and participating in it - even, perhaps, initiating it - gives me enormous delight. I have recently returned to creating fractals and that, too, is a miraculous process - providing more space for the spiritual. I hope the designs communicate that spirit to you in some way.
MSB Lane joined Pixels.com Licensing on January 24th, 2014.
