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Fine Artist PortfolioGary BaconDigital/Photography Artist's Biography Even in his early years as a child growing up in Montana, Gary Bacon was fascinated by cameras and photography. As a boy he experimented with a small hand-me-down bellows camera and developed his film and produced prints in a little darkroom he built under the basement stairs of his family home. Many cameras later amid escalating technological advances, Gary still finds himself fascinated by images and the interplay between content and consciousness. This time Gary hunkers down behind a computer screen where vast amount of time evaporates into the ether while images seem to take on a life of their own as the artist experiences unexpected and delightful transformations. Somewhere in between these two connecting realities of boy and man lay over twenty years of schooling, forty years of teaching, and five years of retirement. A common theme through these life-experiences has been the connection of individual and nature, self and other, and humanness and numinosity. The creative process is a very effective avenue for bridging opposites. It suspends the artist between landscape and individual consciousness. It takes oneself out of the individual reality and lets them hover, almost dream-like, in a rich dynamic state. Gary found this same special quality in his approach to education, spending the last thirty years of his professional life as the founder-director-teacher of a small innovative high school program in Los Altos, California. Currently, he is retired in a quiet neighborhood of Palo Alto where he can be found working in his vegetable garden, tinkering in his woodshop, or weaving digital tapestries from the yarn of memorable photographs. Gary’s artistry is expressed in two major forms, travel photography and abstract digital art. As Gary interfaced with distant cultures in Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Italy, Spain, France, Kenya, and Turkey he was brought face-to-face with the natural beauty of distant places and the underlying mystique of people and culture. He sought to capture the essence of the spirit of place though photography. As he attempted to go deeper into the images of these wonderful natural and cultural venues, he began to experiment with photographic artifacts. This opened Gary to the world of color and form that underlies each photograph. This foray into the underlying foundation of photography has resulted in a rich and unique set of abstract digital tapestries. Gary was influenced as a young child by the beauty and color of his grandmother's craft—patchwork and embroidery quilts, crocheted and knitted blankets, and woven rugs. These techniques and designs are undoubtedly etched is his psyche and, thereby, influencing his own digital tapestry work. In this work, Gary strips the color palette of a richly color photograph, manipulates the color scheme to create design elements in Photoshop, then unites color and form into an original design. The result can be printed on fine-art paper or canvas. By moving the form to canvas, the art of making ancient cloth tapestries is elevated to the canvas of modern art. |