Using long exposures and intentional camera movement, digital artist Bryn Forbes strives to capture “the essence of motion” in his abstract photography and video art. While eliminating certain details that the human eye usually perceives, the process leaves only broad strokes of color behind, allowing viewers to bridge the gaps for themselves.
“It’s the photographic equivalent of painting a landscape with a painter roller rather than a brush,” Forbes told the Sun, before recalling his “accidental” discovery of the process.
“I first started playing with slow shutter techniques while riding in a car,” he said. “I noticed I could see the mountains behind the trees whipping past, but a photograph only showed the trees.”
Forbes then attempted to capture said mountains, but he accidentally moved the camera at one point, leading it to track a single tree instead.
“The result was a reasonably sharp tree while the rest of the forest became abstract blurs, and I really liked that look,” Forbes said.
Next, the artist decided to apply the technique, which he describes as “painting with a camera,” to capture one of his favorite subjects: the ocean. The images became some of the first of Forbes’ Blur Campaign, a series of impressionistic landscapes and seascapes.
“I had been frustrated with my pictures of waves, coming out sharp but looking frozen as if they were made by backlit green and blue glass or ice,” Forbes said. “By using slow shutter speed and following the waves, I felt I got closer to evoking the feeling of the motion of the wave, even though the eye never really sees it that way.”
The pieces in Forbes’ latest exhibit—currently on display at the Ann Foxworthy Gallery at Alan Hancock College—were chosen for their calm, soothing qualities, traits to contrast with the chaotic first weeks of classes at the school, the artist said.
But some pieces contrast the two sides of the spectrum directly, including one video that overlays a scene of tulips in the breeze with an overwhelming flood of Twitter posts. Another is a composite video of different cityscapes.
“There is so much going on detail-wise that the chaos kind of melts into a texture and thus allows the brain to absorb it more calmly,” Forbes said of the video.
“It draws you in with its unique format, movement, and unexpected imagery that unfolds slowly as you view the art,” said Laura-Susan Thomas, director of the gallery. “His work has a Zen or calming feeling as it morphs and changes in front of you.”
Thomas first saw Forbes’ work at a SLOMA pop-up show and was immediately entranced, she said. Forbes’ piece in the show was a large-scale video displayed on monitors that took up an entire wall, similar to the installations viewers will find at the Ann Foxworthy exhibit.
“Some might assume digital artwork is easy as an exhibit because it’s just a file,” Forbes said. “But installing monitors and digital players that survive having the power turned off at the end of the day and recover the next morning adds a challenging infrastructure aspect to it.”
Among the variety of video art, the exhibit includes some of Forbes’ fractal works, which the artist generated through software-rendered equations. Forbes described the results as “a sort of digital Rorschach.”
“I describe them more as explorations than creations because I generate many different random permutations and find interesting aspects that I like and tweak them,” Forbes said.
The combination of art and mathematics is already intrinsically intriguing, but Forbes doesn’t find the comparison particularly unusual, he said.
“I don’t think it’s weird at all as both are trying to solve problems with the materials at hand to achieve a specific result,” he said.
“I also have enjoyed hearing what other people see in them. People see dragons or flowers, when it’s all really a digital construct, starting with math.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood barely passed his last math class with a C-minus. Send official transcript requests to cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 22-29, 2019.