Source: Weekend Pictorial
As a student, he underwent professional training in painting and modern dance, and successively studied under Gandy M. Gandy Brodie, John B. John Baldessari, Welling worked in the media of video, performance and installation, and his graduation work eventually settled on "Appropriation Art". At the age of 25, not satisfied with his previous creative methods, Welling decided to use the camera exclusively, a new medium for him, as a basis for professional pure art training, modern dance as the first love, and self-taught photography became his unique creative medium. This slash experience may also explain why James Welling's photography is so "fickle."
James Welling, 4776, 2015, © James Welling
Throughout Welling's artistic career of more than forty years, his creations often metamorphosed, the pursuit and exploration of new photographic creation methods has never stopped, if you look at his creations according to the series, it is difficult to see the continuity of consistency, and even it is difficult to summarize the creative style, sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative, sometimes black and white, sometimes colorful, almost every series is an independent or parallel adventure. Welling is also one of the few artists in the history of photography who has combined technical photography, media experimentation, ideas, appropriation techniques, etc. His work often discusses the extension of objects in time and space, or landscapes in the microscopic world that have not been seen; he also introduces explorations in architecture, performance, materials and other fields into photography. Despite its "fickleness", Welling's work gives a sense of inward, calmness, and even the most intense colors flow slowly in Welling's work, with a rational tenderness and restraint; subtle fluctuations at the intersection of organic and inorganic, naturally occurring and deliberately created.
Welling's first major series was Aluminum Foil, created in the 1980s, in which he focused on crumpled foil with black-and-white images and close-ups to construct the image itself, rather than simply searching for and documenting the images that existed. The close-up texture of the aluminum foil fills the whole picture, like a minimalist abstraction, and like a vast starry sky, sparkling water waves, moving freely between abstraction and figuration.
James Welling, Roman Glassware, 2020, © James Welling
Welling continued to explore different possibilities in black and white, including the Light Sources series (1992-2001), the New Abstractions series (1998-2000), the Connecticut Landscapes series (1998-2007), and the Railroad Photographs series., 1987-2000) and so on. Among them, "New Abstraction" and "New Connecticut Landscape" are an abstract series and a figurative series that the artist unfolds at the same time. In New Abstraction, Welling uses the concept of photogram, in which the black shapes are imaged by Welling placing strips of different thicknesses on photosensitive paper, rather than being shot with a camera—concrete objects are projected into abstract images. And in Landscapes of New Connecticut, the artist began to show the black border of the negative as part of the image, and he realized that the edges of the film somehow represented the shadow of the camera, the opacity of matter, "which is like a shadow of the world, coexisting with the optical image produced by the camera lens." ”
After more than two decades of black-and-white exploration, starting with the Flowers series in 2014, Welling entered the era of color. This group of "Flowers" is a continuation of the creation of object projections. The earliest Flowers were completed in a color darkroom, where Welling stacked brightly colored gel layers on a black-and-white negative that photographed the flowers, thereby adding irregular bright patches of color to the flower's morphology to form the final image. In 2014, Welling began working on the Flower series on computers. He enhanced the colors with red, green, and blue color channels in the hotoshop software, making the work more and more psychedelic. Welling's shift in color exploration was aided by his friend, the New York composer Glenn Branca. Blanca excitedly told Welling that Beethoven used all the keyboards on the piano when composing Piano Concerto No. 5. What a shocking picture! Welling introduced this idea into the chromatography and decided to create it using all the colors visible to the naked eye on the spectrum. He also came to realize that there was no color that could not be used, especially now that the color rendering field of inkjet printers was so extensive. Recalling Blanca's introduction, Beethoven urged the piano makers to extend the musical range of the instrument, while the artist changed and extended the medium in which he created.
In the subsequent Choreograph series (Choreograph, 2014-2020), Welling returned to the "love of a lifetime" modern dance in the form of photography, superimposing intense colors with multi-layered images. Welling admits that while thinking about dance, he was also photographing some of the Fauvist buildings of the 1960s, experimenting with double and triple exposures, and delving into color patterns in picture editing programs. In the series of "Choreography", Welling will generally start with the rehearsal of the shooting dance troupe, select 2-3 works from 500 to 1000 exposure as the starting point, and then synthesize these dance photos with the images of architectural space and natural scenery taken earlier or at the same time to create a "digital collage". As a result, figurative layers conceal each other in the confusion of color, but also compete for attention, and each photograph has a rich texture and jumping space-time clues.
James Welling, 8634, 2015, © James Welling
Welling's exploration of photography continues, and recently he came to the ancient Mediterranean world and returned to the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations - the Cento series, Welling traveled to dozens of museums around the world to photograph classical sculptures and objects, in a unique way of image processing, the oil paint is applied to the photographic prints, resulting in a romantic hazy, like traveling through time and space. Bringing together more than 40 years of continuous exploration and creation, the artist's solo exhibition "Metamorphosis" is being staged at the Traverse Gallery Hong Kong space.