Artist, art and environment

Last year a took a series of images of Zheni Warner who is a Bulgaria Artist resident in the UK since 1975. Abstract shapes, objects or suggestions you see in the paintings are the result of your interaction with it. The titles reflect the poetry , such as “Wines and perfumes and liqueurs Making the brain, the heart, delirious. Zheni uses is her own heightened vision, carefully subsumed within a willingness to experiment with technique and form, most recently incorporating different light sources within her paintings. There is no underlying system, no ideological message, no attempt to tell a story. The intentions with my images of Zheni was to tell a story of her and how the art work that merges together with her vibrate personality and the abstraction of colour and shape she makes. This was something that I wanted to achieve within each image and make an element of abstraction through the camera and not through post production. The techniques I used where reactions and response to Zheni who so much create energy. The Techniques change very quickly to each set up we did use reflections, distortion of materials on the lens and painting with light through slow shutter speeds. The emotion of magic of allusion and visual alliteration allowed me to experiment and distort reality and abstraction. A hint of state of mind, which aids my response rather than determining the interpretation of each image, blending both the artist with the art, sometime pushing it totally to the limit as getting an image, which some the images became too blurred and had no meaning. Colour is such an import factor for both of us and this really did come through the image form colour abstraction, sometimes feeling like another world, dreamy like. A feeling that a joyful genie has danced off the palette and is celebrating another place in the past or the future. The bright colour spectrum and even darker colours are allowed their full value and are not relegated to subservient roles. The location was a beautiful Norfolk manner house with lots of out buildings and wonderful spaces that was owned by a friend of Zheni. This location had another effect to the way I took the images also, using available ambient and then adding a little artificial light to create a raw feel of emotion of colour and tone which absorbed into the piece of art work. With this series, it was just a set of portrait images, it was I wanted to include the pieces of art within the frame, and the environment it was placed. This I was able to create images with a sense of place, inspired by the self portraits of Francesca Woodman. I wanted my images to have their own identity of an artist and her work.