My last blog post had a black and white graphics style; these abstract photographs illustrate the full spectrum in the most glorious colours imaginable. As seen by New York based artist Eric Cahan’s breathtaking Sky Series of photographs taken at sunrise and sunset in NY and CA. I’ve selected from his online portfolio website a few pieces to showcase in portrait format, there’s also a horizontal and diptych/triptych series, but these verticals seem to allow enough space to draw the eye downwards in infinitely subtle colour variations. Sometimes revealing hints of land mass and seascape whilst remaining mysteriously familiar. Compositionally they are not about places and landmarks, but a sense of watchfulness, utilising real low lighting conditions, rather than flash lighting photography. The sky series is similar in an evocative sense to films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, as lovers, they trace a moment of time together forming and reforming discontinuous connections. These pictures abstractly enable the viewer to form emotional connections from feelings of graduating vagueness to intense richness of hue. Like the films in context, they could be tracing the lives of the two characters across two continents, possibly showing a doomed love affair that lingers and yet remains open-ended.
By way of repetition, the series captures a greater sense of renewal and change according to different factors such as the location, the classifying sunset and sunrise and the precise time. Acknowledged by the photographic titles. Graduating harmonies and colour contrasts are all subtlety variables. The series looks and feels surprisingly soft with disappearing horizons and colours that may at first appear to be symmetrically balanced. There’s a vivid cadmium yellow in one piece and a pale cobalt green sky with a soft curve of muted yellow in another.
Sunsets are at risk of looking like visual cliches with inclusions of silhouettes surfing and lovers strolling. These scenes are all too familiar and reminiscent of stock photography’s contrived poses. This quote by Eric Cahan clearly describes his creative endeavour: “My work is meant to capture a moment in nature, asking and empowering the viewer to be fully present, involved, and uplifted. I want the viewer to be drawn in, and be completely absorbed by, rather than separate from that fleeting moment in time.” These are more spiritually and visually engaging, all about colour nuances and the timing of natural light. The clouds not always, but sometimes dancing across the surface like a brush stroke adding textured marks as soft and sometimes as similar as a dramatic pause.
