Buy some art, folks! I had the pleasure of purchasing an outstanding canvas print and removing it from the wall with my daughter at Stone Cup in Chattanooga a couple weeks ago. Brian, it was great hanging out over a beverage and blades at the coffee shop. You are a wealth of knowledge and a true artist.
If any of you pass through Chattanooga, stop at Stone Cup and see his work. His stuff is also available online. Support art!! And beautify your digs at the same time..or gift it.
Congrats brian, and thanks again. I displayed your piece and my Trackrock glue-up at the hotel all weekend!
View attachment 1108222
Thank you Jason! It was great hanging out with you for a while, I hope we get to do that again some day. I very much appreciate your support and the support of a few other close friends I have made here in this forum over the last ten years. I don't know that I would have made it this far or done near as well at it without the help and moral support of you guys.
I don't know if I got to tell you the story behind that shot or not. There is no photo shop there, just a bit of oversaturation of the colors occurring organically through the orange lightening that was going on. That was the first time I had seen that here. Usually the lightning here is blue or purple looking through the clouds. I was actually on the Veterans Bridge coming back from the art district when I saw the clouds sitting right down on the bridge tops nearly and turning orange with every lightning strike. So at first I risked speeding tickets to get across the bridge fast enough, then I'm pretty sure the light was already red when I turned into the road into Coolidge Park. Then I sort of slid to a stop in a no parking area in the culd de sac with the Blue Rhino statue in it, jumped out of the truck, and ran down the canoe launch. It wasn't raining much yet at that time, so I started trying to line up the shot the way I wanted it. I was almost waist deep in the water by the time I got the bridges lined up where I wanted them, and it was raining so hard by the time I got the shot lined up that my UV filter was coated in so many drops of water all the lights made it like looking through a Kaleidoscope. But when I had the camer on the settings I thought I needed, and the shot lined up the way I wanted it, I held the camera lens down, took off the UV filter, raised the camera and started shooting. Out of the Fifty or so frames I shot I managed to get 6 files that caught the orange tint to the clouds before my camera and lens were drenched and I could do no more. I couldn't make out anything clearly through the lens, and the lightning was getting so intense I was feeling the tingles every time it struck. The one you have is one of the files I over-saturated the color of, and that is all I did there is no photoshopping just added color because it's a mixed media work inspired by Leonid Afremov, who has been a huge influence on my art work since I was in middle school and saw some of his art in a museum.
This image below is the one I am having printed out on canvas much larger than the one on the front wall at Stone Cup for the back wall of my art studio. I'll have it printed out around 8 or maybe even 10 feet wide. If you look at the top of the image you can see the water drops in the image where the lens was almost saturated, and right after that shot was when I got the worst tingle from the lightning and that was a little scary since the storm was still increasing in intensity. But I suppose I was "willing to die trying to get these shots", as a lady friend refers to it, because it was me finally getting an image very similar to one the 12 year old version of me had stood on a pier in Miami in the middle of an intense electrical storm, trying desperately to capture with a Pentax K1000 that I had just spent my entire savings on a few weeks before, as part of a project I had just started called painting with light That storm happened while I was with my dad visiting my grandmother, two weeks before I would go visit a mother I was missing, but who couldn't care less if I was even alive, and get stuck there in her world of drug and alcohol induced insanity, when my father had an accident at work while I was gone and not there to hold the ladder for him. I would spend the rest of my childhood hating myself for missing her, and going to visit her. I hadn't really processed it all, or even thought much about it, until the day I hung those prints on the walls at Stone Cup. And then I just sat there lost in flashbacks for a few minutes. I remembered the storm on the pier, I remembered the phone call about Dad's accident, I remembered so many psychotic moments with my mother and stepfather who I thought were insane, I remembered the night it all went upside down and watched in my mind's eye my stepfather's face disappearing as I shoved the gun barrel out from under my chin and back at him right as he pulled the trigger after he had already shot my mother. I remembered standing there staring at the bodies of the two people I had sat across from at the dinner table for the last few years and all of their yelling at me. I remembered sitting in cold dumpsters in the middle of the winter to escape the wind's chill and find whatever I could to eat there. I remembered days of fighting for my life with all I had, and nights of running for it just sure I wouldn't survive the night. The nights of washing off all the blood and being relieved that not that much of it was my own. I remembered a night of crying while trying to talk a friend into putting the knife down and keep fighting because one day what her father had done would fade out some, and another night of talking another friend down off a ledge. I remembered that not all of us made it alive, as some of the kids just couldn't deal with things that had happened to them, and worse yet that for the most part there was no-one who cared that they didn't make. And I remembered finally realizing I was an adult, several months after my 18th birthday and that I didn't have to run from the juvenile system anymore. And I remembered so many of the struggles of reintegrating back into society and coping with my PTS issues. So I hope you enjoy the image Jason, it's not just any ol' picture. Behind everyone of the images I have put up on the website, there is a story some are very deep. By the end of this summer they will be on display in several restaurants and coffee shops in the city center and on the south side as well. Some of the owners of those shops have already decided which prints and others are still trying to make up their minds. There is one series of shots of the moon on the website where I quite literally ran over a mile as fast as I could run holding my camera up in the air above people's heads at time, from where I watched it rise for the rising shot, two where I took three other shots of it, because I really wanted one of those shots in particular, and was hoping I could run better since I had quit smoking and I actually made it.
And this is what the lightning over the river usually looks like. You can see the lightning bolt in the sky and reflected in the water too
