Color Light Abstraction 2054"I discovered that I could take a piece of crystal or glass this is very fine optical glass from Palomar Observatory and crack it up. This will crack up into thousands of little pieces and each one of them comes out with just a beautiful fracture. I would put a few little pieces on a contraption of 8 or 10 layers of glass and I'd have a light underneath. And then I would use this light. As I moved the pieces around against colored things, the fractures would begin to show up in different ways. It was such close-up work. You couldn't identify the glass, but by being that close and out-of-focus, all kinds of strange and beautiful optical shapes and effects would form in space. To me that's real, that's no illusion.  I could move one of these little pieces and it would change the whole character of the picture. I used every kind of light prismatic light, lights under, lights to the side
. I could move the lamp, I could move the light underneath I could control the form of the optical image. I wouldn't use them all at the same time, I would just use them creatively. It was a very experimental period, a very exciting period."
~ Wynn Bullock from an interview recorded a few months before his death in 1975 during the making of the film Wynn Bullock: Photographer by Thom Tyson. |
