A Rave for Jim Smart

I want to encourage my blog visitors to visit Calumet Photo’s Santa Ana Store (1430 S. Village Way, Santa Ana, CA 92705) and view the Jim Smart exhibit in the store’s gallery.

Jim’s landscape and two portrait images demonstrate strong photographic artisanship, patience for the light, with compositions that are simple and direct. What is great about this work is that you will not see the umpteenth ‘post card’-like landscape with cunning lighting and drama angles, techniques that are OK for a commercial presence but at the same time often seem awkward and over reaching. Instead, you will view a series of images that are quiet, reflective, and in a number of the images, there is a strong meditative quality. It’s this meditative quality that I find intriguing as he couples this to direct compositions that provoke questions that once cannot accurately form with words.

Smart is an accomplished English Professor, but as his exhibit demonstrates he is also an emerging fine art photographer who has come to terms with the fact that photography is seldom entirely within the control of the artist and is often a collaboration with chance. It is obvious that his visual voice is forging a process between the mediation of the camera and the dimension of his subjects and three of his images, (thumbnails included here) are illustrative of where his work is now and where it seems destined in the future.

In Barn on Bear Lake Utah, we have a flat plane, little ground, a tightly cropped memoir to times past. The bricks on the roof are a standalone sonata from the main composition, at once out of place and at the same time in harmony with barn’s past. In Dilapidated Barn, Montana, we have a foreground of new growth flowers juxtaposed against a barn roof sinking into the past. In his untitled ‘picket fenced house’, we view an abandoned homestead that has a sense of ghostly occupancy. The lightening rod, dead elm, and a lawn that seems to get an occasional mowing, delivers a quiet monument to vacancy and perhaps abandonment, a subject that I find intriguing.

I see these images as indicators of Jim’s emerging voice as he transients from solid image-maker to long-term art producer, because these images are indicative of vision, depth, and authentic sensitivity. And what of the other images on display— that are worthy of the wall space they occupy and allow us to appreciate Jim’s skills, and his intuitive ability to sympathize with the landscape as environment.

Go. See. And Enjoy Jim Smart.

Regards,
Bob Killen
http://www.bobkillen.com
http://bobkillen.blogspot.com/
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Scheduled CALUMET Workshop Dates

I will be teaching a series of Fine Art Photography Workshops at the Calumet Photographic Santa Ana and Los Angeles (Hollywood) stores with a launch in November. (See the schedule). Each of these stores has a great classroom and gallery space that you will find comfortable and conducive to a great learning experience.

So what is the Fine Art Workshop series all about?

Fine Art Photography stands in contrast to photojournalism and commercial photography as these applications provide visual support for stories, or create a visual stimulus for a product or service. Conversely, Fine Art Photography is often thematic and explores social issues, graphic dislocation, subliminal thought, duality, reality, surrealism, impressionism, and is a genre that is often Vision beyond Record.

That is not to say great photojournalists, landscape, commercial, fashion, and top of the line wedding and portrait photographers are not artists. Many are, which means we can broadly define art as those images, paintings, music, performance, and sculpture that move us to a new emotional place or to a new point of view. But there is a place where artists create images for their own sake and it is in these places that new perspectives unfold, provocation and peace collide, the tension between hue and contrast vibrate, and your worldview may shift ever so slightly or sometimes ‘rock and roll’ with great violence.

In this five workshop series, you will learn that fine art photography is not a mystery that requires great native talent. In fact, fine art photography is an intimate, human activity, filled with all the dangers, recognition, remuneration, success, and failure that accompanies any creative effort. True, as with any artist, fine art image-makers face the universal fears of all artists because they are moving beyond the image in front of them to the soul of the image within them. That type of self-discovery can be a bit jarring to say the least.

However, I am not Dr. Phil, I am a working artist, and I have little interest in the pop psychology that surrounds creative methodologies. Yet, we will help you recognize and overcome those fears, recognize your art senses and artistic themes. In the early workshops, I will help you find the themes that are within your emotional range and then show you how to expand your emotional range. You will learn to see the image in your mind and heart first, then in the camera while visualizing the final product within a Photoshop Space and ultimately as fine art prints.

Each element builds upon the element before. You are welcome to choose individual workshops but I would encourage you to do all five and if you do, Calumet will offer you a package price for all the classes. At the end of the series, you will not only create your own vision, you will be on a holistic path of vision growth, able to produce exceptional print media, and know how to develop an audience for your work.

There are three ways to enroll and I encourage you to enroll early as we have a limited number of seats for each workshop.

1. Go to http://www.calumetphoto.com/ctl?ac.ui.pn=common.CalumetEvents and sign up via the Calumet web site.

2. Stop by the Calumet Stores in either Santa Ana at 1430 S. Village Way Santa Ana, CA 92705 or in LA at 1135 N. Highland Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90038 and register there.

3. Call Tammy Smith at Bob Killen Fine Arts at 714.521.5229 and she can get you signed up as well.

Workshop Schedule
Fundamentals of Fine Art Photography
Santa Ana Location: 14 Nov
Los Angeles Location: 21 Nov
$130

Vision beyond Record
Santa Ana Location: 11-12Dec
Los Angeles Location: 4-5 Dec
$199

Fine Art Master Tools 1
Santa Ana Location: 14-15-16 Jan
Los Angeles Location: 7-8-9 Jan
$299

Fine Art Output
Santa Ana Location: 28-29-30 Jan
Los Angeles Location: 21-22-23 Jan
$299

Fine Art Marketing
Santa Ana Location: 13- Feb
Los Angeles Location: 6 Feb
$130

Store Discount if you attend all Five!

Please go to my web site at http://www.bobkillen.com//to download a syllabus for each workshop.

Watch future blogs for individual workshop details. Feel free to e-mail us for additional information or to comment.

Until next time go forth and create!