Metamorphosis

 Purple Reflection - ©Dr. Martin Raskovsky

 

This article was published by iAD365

http://iadx365.com/photography/metamorphosis/

written by Dr. Martín Raskovsky …

Guest article by photographer and digital artist, Dr. Martin Raskovsky from the UK.

I have been a photographer since childhood.

I was nine when I built a darkroom to develop black and white analog photography in the bathroom of my parent’s home. Over the years I realized that the reality my camera captured, did not match my feelings.

It wasn’t enough to capture a beautiful sunset if the image didn’t convey the emotion of being embraced by end-of-day light. I experimented in the darkroom, modifying reality while enlarging and masking beams of light from negative to photographic paper. A method, that eventually I learned, was standard. For me though it was just plain discovery.

Massaging light was a popular technique of the time. Many years later, when digital photography arrived, I did similar manipulations–this time not in the darkroom, but with the aid of a computer. The ideas were the same, the desk tool much richer.

My current interest is in the post capture creative process. It is a search for colours and forms that emanate from my inner thoughts, often completely unrelated to the original subject. Brush in hand, the journey of image transformation is an art form of its own.

Colours and shapes are transformed again and again until a solution emerges, sometimes in a tremendous eureka moment; almost orgasmic.

 

The journey from camera to canvas is my creative journey.

Searching for an image that matches my feelings and emotions is like travelling along a dark tunnel with the light at the end not yet visible. I know it’s there, and I know if I continue I will eventually reach it.

I sometimes end up in a blind alley. Thankfully though, recovery in the digital world is easy. You just back up to a previous state. Sometimes, this different path results in different results. There is usually very little resemblance between original and final art.

 

Original – Here is my reference photo and bases for Tranquility Dawn and Purple Reflection. ©Dr. Martin Raskovsky

 

Critics’ Statements from the London Art Biennale 2017; Chelsea – London;
Special Mention of Excellence, March 2017

Dr. Raskovsky’s creative genius is in fact an outstanding innovation to photographic art: after centuries of technical and technological evolution, the progress of the optical instrument that revolutionized our lives seems to deserve a new dimension. Impressionist painters accelerated the gesture of their brush strokes in order to capture the ephemeral and immediate nuances of
light, while Dr. Raskovsky carries out the process in reverse: he already owns reality and, with a unique and refined vision, he transforms photography into post-impressionistic masterpieces.

Flowing waves and sinuous lines create a sense of movement that vibrates all the nuances of a wild and rampant nature. Dr. Raskovsky’s rich imagination is able to relieve the viewer from the dominant and accepted norms of photographic art and, as a consequence, he opens our minds.