|
|
A P O R T R A I T O F T H E A R T I S T
Jay Kaufman
"I want to take you to places I’ve been and show you images I have seen."
|
Mr. Kaufman has been a professional photographer for nearly 40 years and worked in the field as a photojournalist for United Press International in Europe during the 1960's and back in the States in the 1970's. In his mid career, he moved into editorial and advertising/public relations photography, and then took a sharp turn for a 15 year hiatus as a professional chef . . . cooking being another of Kaufman's many passions.
Only after his introduction to digital graphics software three years ago did he return with great enthusiasm to photography.
Always the artist at heart, though one brush shy of becoming a painter, Kaufman has come full circle from his earliest roots in photography to embrace the unlimited visual terrain of the digital palette. With decades of negatives and transparencies in his vast repertoire of travel, landscape and people images, many of which he realized that; if, but for an errant tree or some other extraneous object that ruined an otherwise good composition; he could now with Photoshop™ and other graphic software tools reclaim, restore and renew images once considered lost.
This renaissance of Kaufman's life and work was beginning to reshape his creative point of view and a series of events that could only be considered kismet began to take him to an area of photographic art that previously had only been contemplated. He found he now had the possibility to bridge the gap between complementary but diverse artistic disciplines and connect them as a single seamless expression. When he realized that he could join photographic images and the essence of fine art painting to create an entirely new visual statement, his imagination was free to explore. He describes his images as having a reminiscent quality, even for the viewer who had never experienced the time or place represented.
Are these images photographs or are they paintings? This has been a continuing question raised at gallery exhibits of his work. Yes, they are photographs, but more-so…and no, they are not paintings, but are they? Kaufman believed a new viewpoint deserved a new point of reference in the lexicon of artistic movements. Each time a new view of the world was expressed onto paper or canvas; there was some confusion and a lot of disagreement. Remember those crazy Impressionists with their out of focus dreamlike pictures? Why can’t they be more like us? Who do those odd Cubists and Abstract Expressionists think they are? Not to mention the Surrealists, Modernists or the artists of the Ashcan School. In every period of art from the caveman with his sharp pigmented rock and his cave wall as canvas, to the Fine Art Photographer with software, keyboard and monitor, there has been a continuous unbroken bond. The commonality of all visual artists is a need to convey a thought or feeling to other people, without a word spoken. Only the tools have changed.
Digital Fine Art Photography has been going through an identity crisis. It has been labeled everything from Mixed Media to Digital Art to Computer Manipulated Imagery. None of which seemed to accurately describe Kaufman’s own understanding of what this new artistic point of view was for him. He tried to distill what characteristics might be attributed to the work he was now creating. In each new image, certain constants prevailed . . . the ability to remove extraneous objects, the ability to replace or contrive space where it had not existed, the ability to create tone and nuance of color or the lack of it. For Kaufman, it was an ideal condition. To be able to create and construct an ideal image in which every aspect from the color of the grass to the shape of a wall to the angle of a smile is solely dependent upon the digital artist’s sense of design.
This is an ideal situation for a photographer and from it came Kaufman’s belief that this new School of Art should be called "Photographic Idealism." He now uses this newly coined term to describe his work and that of his contemporaries who are ever expanding their imagination. Perhaps the term Photographic Idealism will catch on and perhaps not, but this new manner of transmitting an image, a feeling, a remembrance is here to stay at least until the next new School season commences.
Jay Kaufman now works with and sells his images to Interior Designers, retail décor galleries, and art licensing. He has begun to develop a following of enthusiastic collectors both from exhibition sales and internationally through his website located at www.onthewallstudio.com. His images are produced as limited and open edition prints, of varying sizes on both fine art archival quality papers, canvases both unstretched and on stretcher frames, and as single and boxed set high quality greeting cards. Jay Kaufman's Fine Art Photography is published by ON THE WALL STUDIO™.
|
|