OROTONE
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| OROTONE |
| This series was inspired by the brilliant, late 19th / early 20th century photographic artist Edward Sheriff Curtis’ innovative Orotone process. He contact printed his black and white glass plate negatives with another glass plate he had coated with photosensitive emulsion. After processing his glass plate “print,” he painted over the fixed emulsion with gold-pigmented paint. The glass was flipped and viewed through the glass to the black and clear emulsion with the gold paint in the background. When I first saw a Curtis Orotone, I was struck by its stunning beauty and a seed was planted. After much experimenting I managed to achieve a similar aesthetic but using contemporary media and technology and am able to realize them much larger scale than Curtis ever was. The images in my Orotone series are captured as black and white negatives on modern film cameras of small, medium, and large formats. I scan the negatives with a high resolution drum scanner, edit the images with Photoshop and print them with state of the art wide format pigmented inkjet printers on canvas that I first paint with metallic gold acrylic then coat with an inkjet receptive emulsion, varnish, museum wrap and floater frame. I do all this work myself without the use of labs or assistants. |