Queen of the Garden

Stephen Calhoun, artist
 
photographic mixed process15x20h” pigment inkjet | paper 2012 | n/a
 
The possibility of leveraging my fascination with iterative art into a post-retirement career as a working artist begins with this photographic work. The source is a photograph taken with a Canon point-and-shoot camera. Its subject was a wooden model schooner placed in our backyard garden and allowed to suffer the change of a season between winter and spring.

It was the first experiment in vertical iteration I felt successful enough to use for a larger than letter-size print. An office supply outlet printed it on an inkjet roll printer. When the framer saw and appreciated the unsigned work she asked me who was the artist. This predates the actual discovery (by Deba Gray) of my creative projects in visual art by two years. The intimation that I might be onto something inspired me to put even more time into shooting photographs, making set-ups, and iterating the result.

Still, it made no sense at the time that anybody considered any of it to be the work of an ‘artist!’ After all, I at the time considered myself an hobbyist creative who used the camera to provide a break from my music-making.