When I travel, I tend to take a lot of photographs, not just of the tourist spots or the main sights that everyone goes to see, but rather photographs of things I notice that provide artistic inspiration. Sometimes it’s pictures of patterns or colors that I know could give me ideas for paintings, or elements of a future painting, such as this collection of tiles, which I saw at the entrance to a store near the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. Look how many great little “paintings” can be found in these tiles!
Or check out this stained glass window in the Catedral Metropolitana de la Ciudad de México (Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico City). It’s like a Piet Mondrian gone wrong, the geometry a bit crooked, the colors even more restricted than Mondrian’s reds, yellows and blues. I look at this, and photograph it, wondering if I could take ideas from this to make a painting. Of course I enjoy it as a photograph as well, but my point is that I took the picture as a potential bit of source material for my own art ideas.
Then of course there’s photographs that aren’t like these above, but rather inspired by my exposure to great photographers while working at Pace/MacGill Gallery in the early 1990s. Whether it’s my take on street photography or capturing serendipitous moments, I love using my eye to try to capture something unique. For example, in this photograph, I wanted to make sure to shoot the image at an angle so that I could get the words “Rodeo de Santa Fe” up high enough so that the dramatic white clouds could serve as the background and help make the red letters pop. I’m not sure I have the confidence to try to paint this image, as clouds like that are pretty tough to give justice to in paint, but I still like the image as an art work.
With all this said, if you want to see all of my blog posts that include photographs from my various travels and explorations, you can view them (in no particular order) here. If you’d like to see blog posts based on location, check out the Travel and Explore By Location page here.