Berry

After more than 50 years of photographic work, I have narrowed my photographic focus to two areas: Landscape and Semi-Abstract Expressionism. I would characterize this particular portfolio of work as semi abstract-expressionist because I include human figures that, accentuate the link between contexts.

The nature of abstracts suggests an unbridled freedom and the human figure implies just the opposite. The human figure is a concrete, complete entity, secure within its form. Abstract images go hither and yon in search of a completion. It is here where the journey is actually the destination.

Picasso and Braques left formal representational figures and succeeded in splintering those figures into shapes and disparate placement of body parts, therefore creating a context of ideas that hint at a fragmentation of the human condition – the human spirit.

This spirit by its very nature explores many directions and many idiomatic subsets, all of which seek to explain that human condition in its most existential context, ultimately allying it with a perceived deity.

The search for a concrete explanation of our deities leads us to explore, that which lies within us (spiritually), and is expressed, for the artist at least, in a sort of yin and yang of disparate beliefs and conjectures – mostly conjectures based on the preaching of others who believe they are anointed.

It is incumbent, then, on the artist to delve into his psyche and his own belief systems and express that which is found.

Socrates declared that, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” What are your daily objectives? Can those objectives be legitimately pro-active as well as re-active? Simply stated, one need only review personal actions to find rich subjects for artistic expression pursuant to periodic ends. What are your daily objectives? Can those objectives legitimately be pro-active as well as re-active?

The layering of images that created my final abstract expressionist work represented the journey and the final image was indeed the destination. Each one felt complete as if I had arrived and crossed some kind of finishing line, exhausted from the race and in a sense having won it.