November 12, 2024

Fifty years ago, I set aside my painting, graphic art, and print making to focus on my academic agenda. Tenure loomed and I accepted the reality I couldn’t do everything at the same time. After 35 years actively developing analytical techniques to synthesize the meaning of big data for sensible decision making, I spent 15 more years as an emeritus professor trying to organize students into teams collaborating with NGOs to attack the problems of sustainability and the technology development needed to decarbonize the world’s economy. I rationalized that the world must survive if the arts are to survive. By the time I turned 80, I felt other people would have a better chance of saving the world, and I returned to my art. November 14 marked the opening of a three-month show of eight pieces of mine along with a collection of the art of nine other UCLA emeritus faculty at Belmont Village in Westwood. I’m doing this as a fundraiser for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Los Angeles Ballet. They are planning joint premiers for LA28 that I’m eager to help. In the appendix, I give a brief synopsis and image of each of the eight pieces in this show. A current catalog of my images in production is available at: The Cooper Gallery catalog: This piece follows my essay on “Where I See Beauty in the World.”

I am discovering my esthetic as I ask myself what potential photo images are worth taking and printing. I look for the painting I would make if I had the skill. With the modern imaging systems and post-production tools, I can make my version. I’ve been enjoying more panoramic images recently for reasons I’ll elaborate later, but most images remain picture perfect in 3 x 4 framing I get from my iPhone 15 Pro Max. I’ve been composing photos for over 50 years. Through over-learning I know when I’m seeing a picture worth remembering.

What makes this liberating for me: My academic career was founded on mapping surface structure to deep structure to discover meaning in earlier generations of big data. My art embraces surface structure and deep structure simultaneously into what I find beautiful. While my academic work developed analytics tools to aid the synthesis of knowledge, my art can be analytic and/or synthetic simply depending on your point of view. In real time you can’t step closer to the couples strolling across the bay. My art allows viewers to take it in all at once or travel through it in detail at their own pace. That brings an experience to viewing that real life can’t match.

And then there is color. Wow. Cádiz is an ever-changing canvas of brilliant colors and contrasts. The same is true of spots in many parts of the world I’ve been privileged to visit on brief trips. I’m inspired by the colors in nature.

I want to describe what I look for in an image I chose to print.

Composition: My basic art classes started with space-dividing problems. They are the basic structure of a 2-D surface, the bones. Would this image be engaging if it were just a skeleton? How to impart 3-dimensionality to the 2-D space, a 4th-dimension of speed… fast or slow, and how color interacts with the mix were the challenges? I learned a lot studying the psychology of sensation and perception in my undergrad and graduate programs many years ago. I think about rectangles and triangles and how to lead the eye on it’s its journey around the image. In the print of El Faro Sunset below, the stone wall carved from the sea is one strong triangle. In Western cultures the left-to-right printing brings more implied speed to these triangles than the converse orientation would. The sea and shoreline form another triangle going to the horizon. A partial triangle goes from the causeway point to the sunset. That one takes some squinting to see. The basic principles of Prägnanz help here. We tend to take the bits and pieces and make whole images out of them. These are set below the rectangle of sky and sunset, where bursts of color capture attention.

In my academic discipline we looked at the basic structure of large collections of surface connections to the deep structure. Basic structure analysis, factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, other exploratory multivariate technologies are all methods to visualize and distill the meaning of complex data sets. There needed to be traceable relations from the surface to the deeper meaning, which in the data-world translates into reliability and validity and in my esthetic to the depth and clarity I desire in my printed images.  My 17” Epson SC 5370 printer handles 360 ppi and that’s the resolution I expect. Decent margins still provide over 2 million dots of color per inch of picture width. Using 16” x 21” of standard 17” x 22” paper puts 43,545,600 tiny dots at my disposal in all the colors visible in a 10-color set of pigment inks. The number of permutations and combinations is a staggeringly large number, close enough to infinity, I call this infinite focus. I like all my tiny dots to be useful. Topaz.ai helps extract the greatest detail I can for the size of the print. Canson Infinity Arches 88 gives my prints a radiance and painterly feeling I enjoy deeply.

The detail of the El Faro sea wall tells the sedimentary story of Cádiz being carved out of the ocean. That resolution allows one to pick out the fortress, Castillo de San Sebastian, at the end of the causeway. I love to capture images where the surface characters tell longer stories of the first Phoenician port beyond Gibraltar.

For the image taken from my roof looking toward the Cathedral in the late afternoon, depth and infinite focus shows the seagull up close, the Cathedral in mid-range, and that the whole far shore of the bay is lined with windmills. The last (and thus newest) photos in the album are more panoramic. As with the other scene of sunset winter walkers, wide angel with depth and clarity throughout the depth of field opens up storytelling in ways that relive viewing can’t. In "Winter Red Sunrise" described below with the other pieces in the Belmont Village Show, 30-seconds before I snapped this it looked much more like "Just Before Sunrise from the Southeast Balcony." Freezing a moment in time gives the viewer more time to relish a fleeting instant. Depth and Prägnanz allow you to trace the streets as they funnel into the plaza in front of the Cathedral. It’s called the Magic Hour for the golden reflections of the setting sun. The pigment inks allow that sun to radiate off the buildings while the shadows refuse illumination.

I make sure my horizons are level unless the horizon itself is an arc from a GoPro wide-angle lens. The image below is from a fishing trip Rapids Camp in Alaska:

The beauty of Cádiz sunsets is renown. The new pigment inks allow the radiance of backlit images to come off the matte surfaces under museum lights. The luminosity imitates some of William Turner’s sunscapes. Playing with reflections from the sun or the moon produces enjoyable compositions. From my last show at UCLA I learned that displaying these pieces without glass and using museum lights make the luminosity more obvious. None of the distraction of overhead lighting as in the very large photo hung at one UCLA medical clinic (image below):

Equivocal Space I’ve always enjoyed creating figure-ground tensions as in equivocal-space drawing. A block print I did in the 1970s is a good example:

This is based on a charcoal sketch I did from a still life set up in one of my early studio-art classes at Cal. There’s a drape, a table leg, a wine bottle, a pitcher, and several solid forms only found in studio classes.  

Another example is the posterization I did for the front and back flyleaf of my 2004 book on doing a startup while on the UCLA faculty: .

I have reprocessed the original into the lead piece in my show at Belmont Village-UCLA. The depth of field brings a kind of 3-dimensionality to the image. When I view this from six feet away it looks like I'm viewing out of my UCLA office window.

Photography has been a sustained interest over all these years. My travels throughout my career have provided many photographic opportunities. Lugging an SLR became a standard chore. I started using compact digital cameras maybe 25 years ago. They didn’t provide the quality of my SLR photos but were much more convenient.  I switched to more serious digital photography in 2012 on a Nat Geo trip on the Inland Passage. Our captain was spotting where humpback whales were doing bubble-net fishing. A half dozen or so whales dive deep in a circle in waters rich with bait fish and start blowing bubbles. The fish feel trapped inside by the bubbles while one whale roars up from the bottom driving the fish to the surface for all to feast on. This behavior is not taught mother to child. Adult whales form self-organizing work systems for common benefit. I took 1,100 photos my first afternoon. It was an adrenaline rush. I never went back to film.