Frank Grisdale’s Photo Blog

I have a great custom printer – (Klyment is his unique first name, one I have never come across before) – who is based out of my old home town of Edmonton. I still use his services, even though I am now settled in my new life 2000 miles away in Waterloo, Ontario.

Klyment is extremely knowledgeable about all things photographic and a skilled commercial photographer. I believe he has shot for Hugo Boss in Europe recently. 

Here is his latest blog entry that discusses the paper we have chosen to use and some photos of mine that he discusses.

I will be leading a photographer’s workshop in Tuscany in mid June of 2010.
It will be relatively inexpensive compared to other European workshops, and has a vacation component that includes some time in Rome, bicycling, and a winery tour.
The focus will be on capturing the magical early morning and late evening light in one of the world’s most beautiful areas. You must be familiar with your camera, bring along a laptop, and be keen to capture a world class image!
My goal with each participant will be to help them understand the steps and processes that I go through both to capture and edit images as well as understand how I work on the chosen few after the sweet light has faded. I will help you develop a keen appreciation for light, critique your work, and assist you in not only capturing your raw images but more importantly help you turn them into something more.
To register for further information, please check out the workshop website: www.labellavitaarts.com

Tags: photograph workshop, Tuscany

Koe Magazine Interview (from my Japan visit)

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Perhaps the best of art is when it makes you both appreciate and forget the medium being used.  Canadian photographer Frank Grisdale certainly achieves this much in his work. He also challenges the boundaries between photography and painting with a photographic style and post- production methods that seem to turn photographs, literally, into a canvas. There is texture and apparent brush strokes. Light works in uncanny ways. Movement is captured, impressionistic-ally.Grisdale shot briefly late in his teens while traveling the world for a few months. Although self-taught, he landed a photography assignment in Lesotho, Africa, where the landscapes became his muse and his subject. He then abandoned photography until he was 45.Why landscapes at this late date? Why photography? And how came this unique style?

Koe: Photographers like Ansel Adams turned landscape photography into art of a high order, but these days it seems clichéd for the most part. Why did you choose this genre?

Frank Grisdale: The greatest joy in life comes from being all you can be, which is a whopper of a cliché, but clichés are well worn because they resonate truth. I knew I had to develop an unrelenting focus and stay with it for a very long time in order to be ’successful’ – which I define as being happy with what I have achieved. It’s the 10,000-hour rule. Put in that amount of time and you can’t help but become very good, even world class at whatever it is you are doing. Having said that, I am no where near 10,000 hours – but I aim to be there by age 90, which is when I anticipate I will peak artistically.

So I knew when I decided to pursue photography for the last half of my productive life that I had to choose a genre that I could ‘live with’ for a long stretch. And getting up ridiculously early and being out there in the perfect setting at just the right time was something I knew I could do, consistently, over time. I had been doing it naturally since I was a kid working at our family farm in the summers. Being forced out of bed so regularly and so early by my father to go check the cattle with him imbedded the glory of early morning light in my brain.

K: How do you avoid cliché and sentimentalism?

FG: There was a long period of time between when I was deep into photography during university and my re-start in photography when I turned 45. So even though I didn’t have a camera with me for that 20 year period, I was constantly thinking about photography, reading about it and framing scenes in my head, just because I enjoyed visualizing imagery and viewing images. I bought every book published about photography worth buying. So by the time I started shooting seriously I had a very strong foundation of knowledge about what had been done. Like everyone though, in the first period of developing my work, I had to shoot what others had shot before me—a la Ansel Adams—just to get it out of my system and of course just to get technically proficient by shooting a lot. But I quickly found that shooting what I knew had been done before was unrewarding, uninspiring, and the only people who thought it was great stuff were people who didn’t know much about photography’s history and were seeing something new in what I knew was old.

So the challenge for me after getting my chops down was to shoot landscape the way I had been seeing it in my mind all those years when I was not carrying a camera. Those mind shots are impressionistic, like all day dreams, so I began to try to shoot images that recalled that zen-like state of mind. I hadn’t seen anyone doing that kind of imagery in all my reading so I guess that is how I managed to avoid cliché and sentimentalism—by trying hard to shoot in a style and with a feel that I hadn’t seen in any of the hundreds of books and magazines that I had studied.

K: Your pictures share some qualities with abstract impressionism. Was this conscious or simply a result of your technique?

FG: I can’t say I set out with a goal to be an impressionist. I do recall thinking early on that the detail of an Ansel Adams shot was boring to me—almost too technically perfect to be interesting. That kind of work is the goal of most landscape photographers, so the number of competing images is ridiculous, and they all end up looking like each other. I wanted to be able to enter a landscape with a different goal—that of interpretation rather than duplication.

K: How have painters and their techniques informed your work?

FG: Obviously I like color so Rothko’s fields of color appeal to me, as does the atmosphere of William Turner. For photographers I should mention that I think the work of Ernst Haas and his motion photography stuck in my head for a long time, as did the intimate nature studies of Eliot Porter. Today I am stunned and inspired by the work of Jack Spencer.

K: Are there any Japanese photographers, or landscape artists, for that matter, whom you admire?

FG: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s legendary seascapes are captivating. Yukikazu Ito has a similar aesthetic but a bit more eerie. He’s an emerging talent.

In his ripe middle-age, it seems Frank Grisdale, too, is an emerging talent. His work is available from a number of international galleries.

Tags: Hiroshi Sumigmoto, Jack Spencer, Koe Magazine, Yukikazu Ito

Years ago (almost 30 to be exact!)  I used to promote local rock and roll bands, produce air guitar competitions, and bring touring bands into town. So the idea of getting back into the game in some way has never left me. I’ve finally figured out how to get back in the game and stay in till I’m 90.

I manage an office of 50 people involved in the investment advisory business. We want to give back to the community in a creative way (OK, I do, but they are up for whatever!). So we (I) have decided to start a seniors’ rock and roll chorus, and perform concerts in our community!

Based on a very successful seniors chorus out of Northampton Massachussets, our group will consist of 18 seniors ranging from 73 to whatever age they want to stay involved. We will perform cover songs by The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Sinead O’Connor, Coldplay, etc.

To give you a very good idea, watch this trailer about a movie produced last year documenting the Massachussets band we are inspired by, called Young At Heart.

Tags: Seniors Rock Chorus, Young At Heart

The opening of my solo exhibition at the Prince Takamodo Gallery, located in the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, was June 26th. It went well with about a hundred people in attendance, from the VIP list of the embassy, and some specific people I had asked the Embassy to invite for me.

My wife Louise and daughter (Mackenzie, see above) came along for the trip which was great. Especially since the opening night was also Louise and my 27th wedding anniversary.

Tokyo is so big it is almost incomprehensible for a prairie boy. We found the subway system to be easy to navigate, perhaps because we had a 23 year old daughter towing us around. Experienced the cramming on to the subway a couple of times, and even managed to get on to the women’s only car – apparently this is segregated to spare women the early morning groping by men.

Saw the temples and gardens of Kyoto, and got there via the Bullet train.

Tags: , Prince Takamodo Gallery, Tokyo

An Essay by Arts Writer Heather Hamel

 

 

“All photographs are memento mori.”

Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977.

 

It had been years since last I looked out over the lake that was an elemental presence in my youth. Watching its mutable surface last summer, I had an epiphany. On certain days when the wind is light but active, the thin surface of the lake—that shallow skin like chrome or aqua—flips and doubles back in fractions of a second as it follows the wind’s flight. To stay with the play, I suspend all projections into the past or the future and I do not take the photograph. As soon as the camera frames one moment of this living panorama and a photograph is presented to the perceiver; the photograph has substituted the water’s infinite capacity to register time and materiality with nostalgia and memory. I had to stifle the desire to capture (and interpret) this experience—to push away the mental image of a camera mounted on a tripod adjusted to the height of my gaze. Simultaneously, I understood certain works I had known of for some time—large format photographs of the rippling surfaces of water by Frank Grisdale. These images have no horizon and little or no atmospheric perspective; they are intense studies of surface and inscribe or retrace the substrate of the paper on which they are printed. They are abstract, but they are also signs or signifiers of something real: water, nature, the land—our struggle to live in a state of grace with the natural world. And now, when I look at them I am nostalgic for my experience of the marking of time on the face of a lake.

 

A photograph has aesthetic qualities intrinsic to the medium itself: an outward-looking or existential determination; a framing of the subject that separates it from its usual spatial and temporal reality; and, as a consequence, a silence or stillness of image. Another, older notion of aesthetics is the expression of beauty through forms that evoke the sublime or transcendent. From the 17th century onwards, the landscape, when finally released from its supporting role in the paintings of the Renaissance, has been inscribed with aesthetic principles that heighten the presence of the sublime.  Many of these motifs are present in the photographs of Western Canada by Frank Grisdale: the minimalist compositions are comprised mainly of horizons that, from photograph to photograph, shift between the upper and lower registers of the picture plane emphasizing sometimes sky; other times the grasslands or the faces of mountains. The romantic desire for spiritual purity is so marked in his work that almost all traces of human activity are kept beyond the frame of the lens. If my words seem equivocal, it is not my intention to deny the artist’s capacity to move the viewer: I am only wary of the meaning implied by their beauty and the beauty of any of the idealized views from the great tradition of landscape painting and photography in North America to depict anything other than desire.  

 

The soft-focus technique that mutes the forms of the land and allows colour to carry the photograph is a clear citation of the early 19th century British painter, J. M. W. Turner – who is frequently the point of departure for the history of Modernism. When I look at Turner’s paintings, yes, I see exhilaration in the light of the sun but in these smoldering atmospheres, I also see the storm clouds of the onset of the industrial age – and there is not an image extant today that can erase the anxiety of the possibility of ecological collapse because it is beautiful.  These places do not exist except as promises of the transcendence. Only by passing through the lens and then the membrane of memory will you approach the nearer side of this place. Much of what I like – and much of what I dislike about the photographs of Frank Grisdale, I understood only after I relented and passed beyond the threshold of yes, but…

 

 

That Frank Grisdale is an Alberta son could not be clearer than to survey his photographic oeuvre. The modernist foundations of art practice that has been and remains the framework for strong art production in this region are present in the landscape photography of Frank Grisdale. His use of analytic perspective with its tendencies to flatten space, to generate ambiguous overlaps—as opposed to the synthetic, highly constructed perspective of the Renaissance—suggest the same visual pressure of vast space on the psyche as with many artists from the prairies. The photographs are modernist in their thrust and ultimately seek to describe the substrate – the surface. The spare compositions and rich colour of his photographs are inscribed with this aesthetic and are come by honestly after years of experience and a clear intent. Views of the land; the faces of people; enigmatic photographs of only water, only sky – all contain, within the frame, the promise of the threshold: the very real possibility that one can crossover into a heightened reality. Frank Grisdale’s work is beautiful, beautifully made and presents a point-of-view that is an antithesis to the irony of our age.

 

“…the habit of photographic seeing—of looking at reality as an array of potential photographs—creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature.”

    Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977.

 

 

 

Memory and Nostalgia: The Landscape Photography of Frank Grisdale

 

Essay by Heather Hamel

Visual Arts Writer

Art Rental and Sales Gallery Manager

Art Gallery of Alberta

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

04/2009

 

Tags: Essay, Heather Hamel, Susan Sontag

In fine art photography there are two well known approaches to editioning original images.

Keep in mind that photography, unlike painting, has no original. Display prints are based on negatives or positives (slides) captured within film cameras, or digital files made by digital cameras. Therefore the decision a photographer must make is what quantity of original prints he will personally endorse with his actual signature as being original.

1) Original Limited Editions - This is where the artist guarantees that there will only be a limited number of personally signed and numbered prints made of any particular image. This is the method that I follow. Originally my prints were limited to 40 plus 4 artist proofs. In the past year at the request of my dealers I have reduced the edition size of new images created after 2007 to 15 plus 2 artist proofs. Within this fixed and finite number the sizes available can vary, and as the edition sells, the price will increase. As well the smaller sizes will be priced lower than the larger sizes. However the total number of all signed prints of any particular image, regardless of size, will not exceed the stated edition limit.

The above approach is the most restrictive in terms of quantity. The total number to be printed and signed by the artist is known in advance by the buyer, and the artist has committed to not launch any further editions. Once the edition is sold out, the buyer can only obtain an original signed print of that image by going on to the secondary market and trying to buy a print from another collector.

Other photographers have chosen to limit their prints by size. For example, he or she might start off by offering 50 signed and numbered prints in the 8×10 size, and then later issue an edition of 25 at 16×24, and then another 10 at 20×30, etc. These are still termed limited editions, but they are limited by size of the print for each edition. This is a looser interpretation of limited edition but is a wide spread and valid practice.

At the other end of the scale, a photographer might decide to only ever issue one signed print. This is as close as it comes to being an original one of one. I have done this with commissioned work.

2) Original Open Editions – Here the artist does not limit the number of prints he or she will make and sign. Each print is signed and usually the prints will be numbered sequentially. Some of the world’s most famous image makers have handled their work in this way, including Ansel Adams. Since his death, his estate has continued to make prints which are marketed as originals. In this case, there will always be another signed ‘original’ available, and there may well be thousands of originals of one print out on the market.

Both approaches are wide spread. The buyer should be clear before purchase what edition approach the artist follows.

Finally, there is the unsigned print. Essentially this is just a glorified poster. There is no publicly available data tracking the quantity printed, and the price and quality is all over the map. The artist or his estate is paid a licensing fee by the printing company but never sees the output product, nor endorses the quality. These are not originals and do not have any more value than any other poster.

Tags: , carving ice

Here’s a kitchen area door with a cropped detail from one of my summer water images. This was planned from the beginning of this California couple’s renovation. The water image is lit by track lights in the room behind.

Hopefully it acts as a night light. I’m imagining one of these light doors in my kitchen, and enjoying it at the peak of viewing conditions, which would be at 2 a.m. when all the other lights are out!

Recently I signed on with GalleryStock – Licensing Images From The World’s Premier Photographers -  a photographers media licensing agency, based out of New York and London. The company represents some amazing artists, so I concluded instantly that maybe it would help my career to be associated with the cream of the crop, however indirectly. For example, here are some names you may recognize: Stephen Shore, Sally Gall, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Brian Finke, George Kavanagh, to name just a few.

I was approached by Stewart Mungeam, General Manager for Europe. After sending him my files, I thought afterwards that perhaps I should be asking some tough questions! Here’s a short but tough Q and A:

FG: Gallery Stock is how old now? What is the background of the founder(s)?

SM: Gallery Stock has been around for 5 years, it was originally created by Bill Charles, to house the Bill Charles photographers archives. It changed into the entity you see now over the last 3 years. Bill had the foresight to see there was a real potential for Gallery Stock to house the best artists in the world. He was joined by Howard Berstein some 3 years ago as a 50/50 partner in Gallery Stock.

FG: How do you choose photographers? Your offering of talent appears to be very high end – were these shooters missing out on media licensing because of their focus on other areas?

SM: We approach the photographers on an ad hoc basis. Anyone that’s been involved in recent photography exhibits, auctions, new books published etc. I can’t speak for my photographers, but stock does open up another revenue stream. Gallery Stock is also a tool to help promote photographers on another level.

FG: Will you limit the amount of photographers you represent, or will the collection grow endlessly?

SM: There are only so many great photographers out there so at some point we will stop. We won’t be taking on any amateur photographers. Gallery Stock really is a collection of the most elite photographers you can find and their very best images.

FG: How do you market the site/work?

SM: The site is marketed globally through press, online one sites such as PDN, Creative Review etc. There is also a brochure of work produced once a year that show cases the amazing talent.

Tags: Bill Charles, Brian Finke, Debbie Fleming Caffery, GalleryStock, George Kavanagh, Howard Berstein, Sally Gall, Stephen Shore