Spooky and Subtle Images

Bromoils are spooky and subtle.  They are implicitly about time.  At first glance they can resemble old photographs, like Daguerreotypes, for instance.  But on closer inspection they’re also very different.  Greater detail, particularly in the midrange emerges, so that the experience of looking at them is not so much the experience of discovering what has been lost, but seeing hidden detail emerge.  In that respect they can have an aesthetic effect like the Meisterstiche of Albrecht Durer.

A friend of ours, Elise Lajeunesse, practices the art and we went to her exhibition at the Sprague Branch of the Salt Lake City Public Library last night.  The subjects of the images in the collection are eclectic and surprising, from medieval cathedrals and castles to lost Coney Island posters to landscapes.  The room where they’re being shown is spacious and pleasant and the art is well lit which isn’t always the case.  We’ve just seen the “Witches and Wicked Bodies” exhibition at the British Museum, which includes some of Durer’s wood block prints, and this morning I find myself considering art that is dynamic through the subtle emergence of detail which can be ironic, even shocking.

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie “Blow-Up” the photographer discovers a murder as he sequentially blows-up images of a photograph of a man and woman in Maryon Park in London.  As the images are cropped and exploded the detail increases in contrast making it more severe and the visual revelation of the murder almost gothic.  That came to mind last night as I was looking at Elise’s elegant and mysterious image of Winchester Cathedral.

One last thing, one of the other aspects of Bromoils I find appealing is the process of creating the image itself.  It can begin digitally, but, the longest, most difficult and labor intensive portion of the process is physical and requires a highly personal and subjective manipulation of ink and paper.