George O. Jackson de Llano
MI FASCINACIÓN POR EL COLOR Y LA LUZ
My fascination with color and light began at an early age because of a creative grandfather, who would hide assorted lifesaver candies for me to discover in the most unlikely places. I see them in my mind at the base of a slide in the jungle of backyard appurtenances that he had laid out for his first grandchild….
I see their colors in the sun, magical reds, yellows, greens, purples, the same as one sees in many images of my current project, photographing abstract compositions of refracted color and light within translucent forms.
This project began a decade ago when, inspired by its twinkle, I began to photograph a wireless crystal chandelier hanging in an east window of my high-rise apartment that would shower my mornings with beautiful, surreal color and light. In this section, you will find my experiments exploring color and light through means of refractive abstraction. They begin with the chandelier, on through work with a skull-shaped bottle, to my current experiences with water plastic water bottles.
CRISTALES
2004 - 2006
This focus began years ago with the sunrise striking a pure de-wired crystal chandelier in an east window, showering my mornings with dazzling color and light resulting from the sun’s prismatic interaction with the crystals as it made its way across the morning sky. I started photographing the chandelier with a telephoto lens, attempting to capture and distill the pure colors and forms that broke out of the morning light.
CALAVERAS RESPLANDECINTES
2006 - 2012
This series of photographs arose out of my fascination with color and light, which I found in refracted abundance in a skull-shaped bottle that could be made to express a range of emotion, thought, and association, as well as forming beautiful abstract patterns. The creative technique that I invented to do this used ordinary materials that I discovered in everyday places, drawn by their unusual colors and textures. Experimenting with different palettes and light has been highly rewarding. The only limit to the creative potential of the glass skull was my own imagination.
I recognized the unusual power of the skull bottle as it went up on the shelf. I noticed how it changed and adapted to the light and colors of its surroundings, and I succumbed to its dynamic spell.
Perhaps I became possessed by the glass skull. But I am not the first. People have been contemplating skulls throughout history - and throughout the history of art-reflecting on life, death, vanity, and fear, as well as the unknown, the occult, reason and the irrational, even the act of contemplation itself. The human skull - the death’s head - is a potent symbol.
These Calaveras photographs are sometimes assembled in groups that I call a “tzompantli,” the Aztec name for the skull racks, sometimes depicted sculpturally as walls of skulls that they built to rack those of the vanquished.
TThe power of the death’s head, along with the skeleton itself, remains dramatically alive in popular culture, especially in Mexico, through the masks and costumes of the seasonal religious festivals and in the dancing skeletons and traditional sugar skulls that come back to lecture, warn, mock, and make fun of us vain and foolish mortals every year on Day of the Dead.
FACE
FACES are the MAGICAL component of my project in that they appear spontaneously when certain formal PORTRAITURE is mirrored. My only influence in their being is my selection of the original portrait that makes them. Some make me think they are from another dimension. I consider them "pilónes", (lagniappe) from the spirits that I portray, offering these faces in the crowd of light spirits coming to be photographed in appreciation of my knowing of their existence.
About my process:
Faces are formed from sequential images in the Portrait Series. They are the result of a process beginning with formal photographic portraiture of visiting spirits of color and light that I imagine into a milieu of crinkled-up translucent forms, assembled on a large mirror in front of an eastern hi-rise window which catches direct morning sun, concentrated and reflected back through a mass of crystals and other shiny things by a series of mirrors, which excites the translucent material causing it to glow, revealing the personages that have come to be photographed in gratitude of my knowing they exist...
Each recognized spirit is then photographed in multiples of 4 four, sometimes as many as twenty times separated by 1/3 stop depending on its density from which the best portrait is selected. After its selection in the series, the sequential PORTRAIT images are then laid on their sides and alternately flipped, each end mirroring the other, to create the thaumaturgical patterns that beget the FACES...