Yellowstone Waking Dreams

Surreal Photo Art by Larry Blackwood

March 13, 2019

Waking dreams occur during periods when one is neither fully awake nor fully asleep.During this time our minds can produce sometimes surprisingly vivid tableaus comprised of rearranged fragments of unrelated memories. It is this sense of rearranged reality that my composite photographs are meant to express. Because of my interest in Yellowstone and its environs, much of my work focuses on that setting, within which I recontextualize bits and pieces of photographic memories from my experiences elsewhere to form surreal combinations. One sub-theme of this work involves imagining how master painters would react to the Yellowstone environment, creating what I call simply “The Masters in Yellowstone.”

Video Description: Larry combines various parts of photographs of animals, landscapes, textures and graphics to create mandalas, mazes, and painterly scenes. He personally does all the photography, computer work, printing, and framing of images. The finished artwork is surface mounted to wood panels so that there is not glass between the viewer and the image. This creates a clean, modern look to the images. Larry says, “I have been involved in photography since my teens. By combining creativity with mechanical and technical skills, photography meets the needs of both the left and right sides of my brain. With my composite images I am able to move past the traditional boundaries of the medium of photography, opening new paths for expressing my creative thoughts. The animal world (particularly crows, ravens, and magpies), symbology, and references to literary, cultural, and mythological icons form the basis of my creations. I use symbols and abstract shapes to move the images beyond mere documentation of the subjects. For backgrounds, I draw on a photographic library of textures and colors patterns that I have acquired over the years. Recently, I have begun to incorporate elements from classic paintings in the compositions as well. In all cases the goal is to create a story or concept in the viewer’s mind that takes them far beyond the constraints of representational photographs.”