Jim Rode Photographer

My new website is launched! Love it. You will too. Catch it at http://www.jimrode.com/.

And just when you think you are on the cutting edge of what is new...

You get slammed dunked into reality. For months I've been offering Gallery Wraps. I've been making portraits using this new style for a year or so. They are on canvas, beautiful, and you don't need a frame! The canvas wraps around a very thick edge. It really stands out. (See the sample image from my lab.) It's kind of like...you can walk into a room, and see the side of the portrait first...really cool. Really new...NOT!

Let me explain. A good artist will always be looking at what was done before. Now I've always admired Georgia O'Keeffe. She was married to Alfred Stieglitz. He help pioneer the recognition of photography as an art form in the early 1900's. She was a great artist. She is famous for her up-close-and-personal portraits of flowers...think -huge painting of a single flower...

Well...how do we put this. He had a way with the ladies... She couldn't stand it of course...but she loved him. So she left New York, and moved to New Mexico, and began to paint there. She bargained with him and made a deal they both could live with. She would come back to New York each summer to be with him...but he had to behave while she was there...then she'd return to the desert for the rest of the year. This is why we have both New Mexico/and New York O'Keefe paintings.

Now keep up with me...I'm getting there. She would paint beautiful portraits of the desert landscape, capturing the beautiful colors (with minimalism for the sky)...and take a lot of ...flack from art critics...who would say "She's breaking the rules...she doesn't know how to paint! She is not making the sky equal to the foreground." etc. etc. Today, her art is $$$.

I went to see some of her work at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. A museum docent was speaking about her...and I sidled over. "She would drive critics crazy by continuing her scenery around the edge of the frame." OMG! There it was. She was making gallery wraps! Kind of... Continuing the image around the frame was practically the same thing-wasn't it? And doing it 80 years ago too. She really knew how to break the rules... It's too bad the critics couldn't see that she was ahead of her time! Well, I'll still do Gallery Wraps...but I won't say "It's the latest thing!"