I will be exploring the work of Ellen Jantzen and Terri Loewenthal. Both of these artists’ work deals primarily or in full with the environment and how psychological states can be represented using it. They are both influenced by their immediate environment, and use unique approaches to achieve imaginative results. Both of their work looks like it is digitally manipulated at first glance, and while it turns out that Ellen’s is, Terri’s work is not. Each of these artists is also inspired by similar areas geographically, with Ellen inspired by New Mexico and Terii inspired by California. Both of these artists approach to landscapes is inspiring to me and makes me excited to to incorporate aspects of their artistic process into my own work.
http://lenscratch.com/2013/08/ellen-jantzen-disturbing-spirits/
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8047455/
Ellen Jantzen is a photographer and photo montage creator who got her start with photography in 2003. She started to make art after she became disillusioned with the corporate world. She is best known for transforming nature in unique ways. She says that it digitally manipulating the photo is her way of bringing herself into the photo. Her series Losing Reality was inspired by her mother-in-law changing as she developed Alzheimer’s and became a different person. Her first landscape pieces were part of a series called Disturbing the Spirits which was inspired by the aging of her parents while she lived in St. Louis. Ellen works from an emotional side intuitively because she thinks it is more genuine and fresh. She also says that she tries to name her pieces poetically and uses a thesaurus often to title her work. Of her work, she says that she likes to work by combining her emotional interior and her graphical sense, and that they are both necessary for a completed peace.
“Like I’m working with them, alongside them, in tandem.”: Twin meets Terri Loewenthal
https://www.wired.com/story/psychscapes-photo-gallery/
Terri Loewenthal creates in camera collages of the Californian landscaping. She doesn’t know what her photographs will look like when she goes to take them. Her photo series Psychscapes explores her adopted home state of California and frequently involves overlapping sky, terrain, and blurry shapes. She frequently goes camping to escape life in the city, and this is where she takes her photos. She shoots her photos with a Mamiya 645 camera and colored filters. Then she uses self-made reflective devices to compose scenes that resemble double exposures but everything is actually shot at once. She says that her work proposes to the viewer what it would do you like to climb into the fantastic terrain in her photos. Of her process, she says that she’s always reacting to what is happening in front of the lens and thinking on her feet. She’s also found that places that are typically designated picture taking spots that say things like ‘scenic view’ often feel very flat. She also limits herself to photographing the landscape within a 360° radius, and combines aspects of the terrain in front of and behind her into one shot. She says that it took her four years to come up and come close to perfecting her method of creating images.
Experimentation:
In the first image, I was playing around with the liquify tool to get different effects. I was playing with a single image and seeing how I could change it in different ways, that I haven’t seen Ellen Jantzen use, like the liquify tool. She uses filters sometimes obviously in her work, and I wanted to experiment with that same in-your-face editing.
I thought about how Terri incorporated multiple frames of her immediate environment into one image and tried to copy that effect with the second image. I wondered what would happen if I duplicated and stretched parts of the image to obscure shapes and used a lighten filter to blend the abstraction into the original picture.
In the third image, I thought about how Terri said her photographs were like paintings. I try to incorporate this idea by downloading an impressionistic brush set. I liked the spontaneity of the brush set but in the end I was not pleased with how it turned out or how it was turning out, so I moved on.
I went to Wintergarden Park and took the image that inspired the fourth one. I was captivated by Terri’s colors and her Psychscapes series. I tried to incorporate some of that fun exploration of color in the bottom image. There’s also clear influence from Ellen Jantzen in the perfect lines created by rows of pixels present in the image. I also love how Ellen and Terri create new landscapes, I tried to incorporate that will also adding my own spin to create the final image. By this last image, I feel like I was able to create something I liked, that was visually pleasing and completely transformative from the original image. I will continue to use the lessons and creative methods I have learned through researching each of these artists for my BFA project.
