Verve Artist Jeffrey Becom to Jury Show

por - tal :  doorway, entrance, opening, entry, gate, egress, opening, aperture, porte, exit, hatch, mirror, passage, threshold, cut, entrada, hole, scuttle, window, approach, camera, breach, mirror.

Portals have given photographers subject matter for their cameras since Niepce began experimenting with photography.  There is an intrigue and mystery that begs the photographer and viewer to question and wonder what is on the other side.  Elliot Erwitt's iconic image entitled California Kiss immediately pops into my minds eye. And what about Atget's images of store fronts in Paris?  The Boulevard de Strasbourg image of the corset shop is just one of many images he captured.  Sam Abell's image entitled Through Lace Curtains makes you feel like you are standing right there with him as he snaps the shutter.  And we all will never forget the story about Alice and the rabbit hole written by photographer Lewis Carroll.  Alice looked thru the opening and found a Wonderland.  

Forty five to fifty images will be selected for exhibition and a Blurb full color catalogue of the exhibit with all the accepted entries will be available for purchase.  Awards are $325 for Juror’s Award, $250 and an exhibition catalogue for Director’s Award, five Honorable Mentions each receiving an exhibition catalogue and $100 for Visitors’ Choice Award. 

Creativity is encouraged.

Jeffrey Becom will be the juror for “Portal”.  Jeffrey comes to his art as a photographer and painter with formal training as an architect. For him these three pursuits ignite one passion: painted doors, windows and walls. The traditional painted facades of vernacular architecture around the globe offer him subject and palette from which to derive his own artwork while he, in turn, documents their history, mystery and power. Paint then—and specifically color—is Becom’s life’s calling, whether he photographs, paints, or write books about painted color customs, myths and meanings.

For over thirty years Jeffrey Becom’s artistic sensibilities have stood squarely in the colorist realm. He is best known for his sensuous use of the silver bleach photographic process to transform architectural imagery into lush, painterly, colorist studies. Similar architectural subjects rendered by Becom in watercolor or in oil and wax on wood panel, as well as his plein-air oil and wax landscape paintings on canvas, are equally respected. Over the past decade he has also pursued his interest in antique darkroom processes to create handcrafted platinum/palladium prints and contemporary tintypes.

Becom has come to find his inspiration in ever-more remote places populated by indigenous, ritual-bound people whose architectural color springs organically from their history, geography and faith. He considers his photographs to be documentary: the colors, subjects and details are captured as found.

A dozen years pursuing painted color in the lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea were followed by a decade’s search in the lesser-known corners of Mexico and Central America to unravel the Maya’s enduring color cosmology. Then in 2002 Becom unfolded his map of South America. His search began in Peru and has continued in Ecuador. In between lengthy trips to the Andean Highlands, he has returned to photograph in Mexico and Guatemala again and again and has released a series of film-based images from Northern India and Kashmir as pigment ink prints on German etching paper.

Becom is also a writer, traveler, designer and visual anthropologist. With his partner, Sally Aberg, he has authored two award-winning books, Mediterranean Color and  Maya Color: The Painted Villages of Mesoamerica (both from Abbeville Press, New York, 1990 and 1997). He is the subject of an hour-long PBS / BBC documentary entitled For the Colors, A Journey Through Italy. Becom’s work is held in public and private collections worldwide and represented by ten fine art photography galleries across the country, including the Catherine Couturier Gallery in Houston, Texas and Verve Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work was featured in the inaugural issue of COLOR magazine in 2009.

Jeffrey’s website is http://www.jeffreybecom.com/.  

Text taken from https://asmithgallery.com/Portal_Call_for_Entry.php

Content copyright 2010-2012. A Smith Gallery and individual artists. All rights reserved.

Visit Jeffrey's work on VERVE's website as well.