ARTIST STATEMENT

 

Erich Fromm once said, “Let your mind start a journey through a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before and let your soul take you to where you long to be..."

 

For me it’s all about the journey; how I get there and how I experience the adventure of being fully alive. A new world opens up to me each time I move behind the lens. There is something about the forces of nature at play around me that heightens my senses and pulls me into focus. Reality dissolves and my aperture merges into a natural moving kaleidoscope of visual textures.

 

Nature is so regenerative, so giving of itself, that to feel this expansiveness mysteriously transmits and unfolds a visual feeling into my camera letting me know I am home. I invite you on my visual journey, down unpaved paths and into gardens where the natural order of things is beyond what you know or whom you think you are; into a world where nature breathes in freedom and exhales expression.

 

Abstract or real, it’s not the subject, but the ability to catch the simplistic magic while holding the details of the message. I feel my purpose is to capture photographic art that delivers a humble, yet powerful and sometimes complex meaning for the observer. Art that brings in and transforms the viewer into participator makes us aligned in that brief moment.

 

My most recent work seems to carry me back into childhood studying black and white photography with my grandfather. It was here that the values and ideals I hold today were first formed. One of these beliefs is that an image whether digital or film should stay pristine, as it was envisioned, and not be manipulated beyond the scope of the intended focus.

 

Derrick Feole