art is all we have

a card for the solstice

December 22, 2011

Most years I make either a solstice or a new year’s card to celebrate the return of the light– I really hate the short days of winter. This year’s card came about at the very tail end of a work session in my studio. I had been documenting some of my older work with the help of my assistant, using a classic studio setup with multiple light sources carefully placed to ensure that the work would be evenly lighted. Frankly, it’s a pretty tedious process.

Once we were done, as an antidote, I decided to play around for a bit with highly uneven lighting.  I grabbed a small flower arrangement I had left over from a dinner party and we began to experiment with various forms of pinpoint and single-source lighting. Eventually we settled on a method of using my assistant’s LED-based miniature flashlight to ‘paint’ light into a fairly long time-lapse photograph. As a bonus, the process left light trails all through the image. (The moving hand, however, disappeared entirely.) The images for this year’s card are cropped from three different stages of our experiments, creating a visual reminder that art always begins with play— even if it ends with the grunt work of documentation).

As always, you are welcome to download this image and use it yourself as a card or small print. As a card, it’s designed to be a three-fold piece, with the righthand end folded back first and the lefthand end folded second. To make this work, the white border has to be trimmed all the way off the two ends— I took a quick snap with my cellphone to show the idea (though it doesn’t do the colors justice). The image is sized so that it can be printed on standard 8.5×11-inch paper; it works best on heavy matte stock with matte-black inks.

The 72-dpi version shown above is only 49 kb; the linked pdfs below are quite a lot larger. I’m including the 2-up version because it is the least wasteful of paper.

Large version (single image, 1.5 mb)

Large version, 2-up (2.7 mb)

And just in case you have a bad case of winter nostalgia, here is the link to last year’s card.

| Tags: artist's studio, experimentation, light, solstice | More: 2011, downloads, latest