Power & Pollution
Artist’s Statement
Gas Works Park, per Wikipedia in a quote from the Seattle Times newspaper, Seattle, Washington, “is easily the strangest park in Seattle and may rank among the strangest in the world.” What makes it so strange and so interesting from an artistic perspective is the fact that it contains remnants of the sole remaining coal gasification plant in the United States and those remnants, which for the most part are now painted different colors, present various designs that can be inspirations for abstract artistic expression. That perspective is derived from the way Seattle landscape architect Richard Haag presented his vision for converting a polluted gasworks site into a park. He wanted “to present the structures and the site not merely as industrial artifacts or historical objects but as works of modern abstract art, a new type of art.” (Thaisa Way, The Landscape Architecture of Richard Haag … page 156.) His vision prevailed and he went on to win the American Society of Landscape Architects Presidents Award of Design Excellence for Gas Works Park.
My son moved to Seattle a few years ago and introduced my wife and myself to the park during a recent visit. I was immediately fascinated by the colorful structures and took many photos of them without any specific plan in mind relative to an artistic expression other than as reflected in the photos. However, after viewing the Moholy-Nagy retrospective, Moholy-Nagy: Future Present, at the Chicago Art Institute, I connected the dots. In my mind’s eye, those colorful Gas Works Park structures combined and recombined themselves into interesting designs which lent themselves to the type of abstract art reminiscent of Moholy-Nagy and before him Wassily Kandinsky and the Bauhaus School.
Very often, I use my photos as a starting point in creating my digital art. Modern digital technology allows me to devise a method of painting in a variety of ways like watercolors, pastels, oils, acrylics, etc. with many techniques such as impressionistic, cubistic, surrealistic, pop art, or abstract art. Consequently, I can pictorially express myself without being locked into a style, and I can create an artistic piece with a style that evolves in a manner that is according to my inner vision, sometimes by way of many iterations. Such a process gives meaning to the concept of art that “springs from the soul” as described in Kandinsky’s book Concerning The Spiritual In Art. I believe this process, most easily realized with digital art, is a legitimate, desirable, and an evolutionary extension of artistic instinct. Obviously, Moholy-Nagy agreed and would encourage the use of digital technology to create such artistic renderings. He implicitly referenced it, albeit in connection with a photogram, as “a bridge leading to a new visual creation for which canvas, paint-brush and pigment cannot serve…the materialization of light, hitherto secondary, becomes more direct.” (Moholy-Nagy: Future Present, Exhibition Book, Page 188)
It appears to me that the teachings of Moholy-Nagy are the logical extension of the artistic ideas of Kandinsky and the Bauhaus School. That extension encompasses new tools to be used by the modern artist. For me, the new tools include Photoshop, Illustrator, iMovie, iPhone, iPad Pro and all the filters, applications and apps that can aid me in expressing an artistic vision projected as a finished piece of digital art.
So, in the spirit of the forward-looking ideas of Wassily Kandinsky, the Bauhaus School, and Moholy-Nagy, I present the following abstract digital art, selected from my book entitled Gas Works Park Abstract Art, which book was inspired by Gas Works Park and rendered by using digital photography, digital manipulation by computers and software, and most importantly created by a human’s artistic vision.
Gas Works Park Abstract #1
Gas Works Park Abstraction #2
Gas Works Park Abstraction #4
Gas Works Park Abstraction #5
Gas Works Park Abstraction #10
Gas Works Park Abstraction #13
Gas Works Park Abstraction #20
Gas Works Park Abstraction #23