| P2P | What have you learned from another artist lately? |
| JD | Honestly I’m not sure how to answer this, my art is I and I am my art. I always have a hard time explaining this to people outside the art world. It is just something I do. |
| MEC | I’m a living human being, and my art is silver and paper and ink and assorted chemicals. So that’s a big difference. Aside from that, my art is really just an extension of a mood or emotion usually, a tiny slice of what I feel at any given moment. So to that end, if you lined every photograph I’d ever taken end to end, you’d have something like a two minute explanation of “me”. |
| P2P | What have you learned from another artist lately? |
| JD | Good work needs a “left hook” James Davis |
| MEC | I suppose lately it would be rediscovering Andrew Wyeth’s use of color to convey something like half of the intention of each of his pieces. Also, his bare bones approach and his stripping of all falsehood to present what America really is. No romanticism, just purely the truth. |
| P2P | Who or what is your biggest influence in your art making? |
| JD | Conceptually I would say music and visually science and scientific methods of display. |
| MEC | I would say music is by far my biggest influence. That and the moods and emotions that I experience through having Bipolar Disorder. As far as how to BE an artist, definitely Marcel Duchamp. I find people who actually take themselves seriously to be truly revolting. Although I suppose that’s why they make the big money and I struggle just to pay for my film. To each his own, I suppose. |
| P2P | What are you trying to do to people with your art? |
| JD | Challenge the way they understand the natural world and the way we interact with our growing immediate commercial environment. |
| MEC | Hypnotize them into buying some? I don’t know. I guess just taking them for just a moment to a place I’ve been, something I’ve felt that maybe they have too. Saying things that we all think are totally personal which are really just universal concepts. Trapped in the collective unconscious. We are all more connected than we’d like to believe. |
| P2P | What is one of your favorite photo processes or techniques and why? |
| JD | Definitely digital workflow, this has been an amazing transformation. I love that I can make an image and basically do what ever I want to it creatively. |
| MEC | This changes literally every day, sometimes a few times an hour. But I think over the long term my 4×5 work is the most beautiful, challenging, completely fulfilling, and the closest to what I’d LIKE to be doing. The control over everything within the frame, calling attention to the exact details I want to just the extent I want is really empowering. I’m not just capturing what I see and hoping it’s close to what I wanted. But above and beyond that, my work in boiling and burning transparencies, the Digital Diana I built (completely different than just a Diana lens cap on a DLSR), and a few other techniques still in production inspire me to continue pushing myself to create and properly utilize new tools in my overall camera arsenal. |
See the exhibition here:
