About
I live in the woods in northern California looking out across the San Francisco Bay towards the hills of Marin, San Francisco and Angel Island. The distant blue hills of my “Faraway Hills” series are ever-present fixtures in my real life. Down below is the bay and above is an endless web of tree branches. Their silhouettes have etched themselves into my memory. My paintings and prints are always nature-inspired and nearly always monochromatic. Having spent a decade as a printmaker making woodcuts, linocuts, etchings, aquatints and monotypes, my mind works in monochrome. I focus on a single color, composition, positive and negative space, pattern, lines and shape.
I currently work in two mediums, acrylic painting and cyanotypes, a form of camera-less photography. Cyanotypes are a 19th century form of lensless photography also known as photograms, blueprints and sun prints. They resemble block prints or etchings but use no ink nor printing press. Light “etches” the image on paper I had painted with light-sensitive chemicals. My botanical cyanotypes are each unique monotypes. They are slow camera-less photographs made outdoors using natural light and no film negative. There is no lens nor etched plate nor ink and printing press. Only my landscape photographs printed from giant negatives using the cyanotype process are replicable.
Traditional single-exposure cyanotype prints are a solid dark blue with a crisp white silhouette. My botanical cyanotypes of varying shades of blue are triple-exposure and sometimes quadruple-exposure cyanotypes. Plant cuttings are arranged on paper previously coated with light-sensitive chemicals and then rearranged in different locations on the same paper, taking it in and out of sunlight, and then re-exposing the paper to light multiple times, creating ghostly overlapping images. The effect is like moonlight or sunlight through leaves.
MY NEWEST SERIES OF ABSTRACT CYANOTYPES (2022-2023)
In 2022 I invented my own technique to create multiple-exposure abstract cyanotypes using water, rather than solid objects like plants, to create shapes and patterns. My technique is a form of experimental photography, much like the action painters Morris Louis, who poured his veil paintings, or Jackson Pollock who dripped and drizzled his. My abstract cyanotypes are luminous like watercolor paintings but are actually photographs. Each is a multiple-exposure lensless photograph I make through deliberate movements of the light-sensitive paper during its exposure to light. Different sections of the paper were exposed to light for a longer or shorter time, yielding darker and lighter shades of blue.
Each abstract cyanotype is entirely unique and can have up to 20 separate exposures in each print, each demarcated by a change in the shades of blue. A traditional single-exposure cyanotype yields a white silhouette against a dark blue background. But instead of creating a white image by blocking light with solid objects on the light-sensitive paper, I used water to block the light, creating subtle gradations of darkening blue as I submerged the light-sensitive paper for different carefully timed exposures under water, turning, bending and lifting the paper as needed to shape the lines before they become permanently etched by the sun’s light.
My botanical and abstract cyanotypes are all monotypes. They are each one-of-a-kind slow camera-less photographs made outdoors using natural light and no film negative. There is no lens, no etched plate, no ink or printing press. There is no way to reproduce exactly the same print even if the same plant cuttings are kept and used in a series before they wilt. As much time is spent planning the exact composition and carefully timing the separate exposures as in the final exposure and the rinsing. Only my cyanotype landscape photographs printed from an oversized negative have more than one edition, though all hand-printed. (See my “Foggy Woods” series).
I have worked in a dozen mediums— from woodcuts to linocuts, etchings, aquatints, monoprints, cyanotype, collage, encaustic, oils, acrylic, bronze sculpture, clay sculpture and stone sculpture. My works hang in hotels, hospitals, corporate offices and private collections in ten countries. My cyanotypes have been published in The Hand magazine, Aeonian photography magazine, and featured online by Analog Forever magazine and dozens of times by SaatchiArt.com. I live in the hills of Oakland, California, across the bay from San Francisco, where I was born and raised.
Photo: Jonathan Botkin
Painting using light-sensitive cyanotype chemicals
A painting/photograph hybrid: First a drawing is filled in with light-sensitive emulsion in a dark room. A day later once dry, delicate plants are laid over the painted areas and it is exposed to sunlight for multiple exposures to yield a blue and white pattern within the silhouette of the agapanthus flowers.