{ Monthly Archives }
Lush double exposure paintings by Pakayla Biehn to drag your Thursday out of the doldrums. If that word is unfamiliar to you, then go read The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. But first get some solid look time in with these paintings of beautiful women superimposed over flowers. I never wake up thinking I’m gonna say things like that sometime during the day. And that is why I keep doing this.
LA photographer Lou Mora seems like a genuinely happy, really nice guy; the kind of guy you always want to succeed no matter how you feel about the rest of the world. That in itself would be enough for me to support him, but luckily he’s also an incredibly talented photographer. He manages to capture that beautifully crafted, seemingly effortless moment that comes off as something personal and natural. Notice I said “seemingly effortless,” because he is damn sure working his ass off for those shots. I’ve said it before, but photography is an art that anyone can practice, but that very few are any good at. There are a million variables that go into a good shot, and not enough control over all of them to be certain each time that everything won’t be ruined. For Lou Mora all those variables line right up and pause for that one brief click of the shutter.
If I were sitting alone in a quiet, unheated room on a cold Winter day, my breath fogging in the air a little, wrapped in a warm knitted blanket, reading Gravity’s Rainbow, with Eliot Smith quietly playing on a record player in another part of the house, and two hits of clean acid pulsating through my pupils, that would be the embodiment of Ryan Schneider’s work. Flattened, super colorful, but with mystery and loneliness and magic, this is the kind of work that makes you think of all those times you’ve come home from a walk through the empty streets at 3am to an empty house, brightly lit and expectant, like a puppy waiting for your return. Thanks Ryan, for reminding me how it feels to be all by myself in a world of gentle possibility.