A friend asked why I photograph the Daily Bird panels on an angle. Three reasons:
- The diamond-shaped photos look better on my blog page.
- Encaustic is difficult to photograph. These represent the pieces better than if I shoot them straight-on. I’ll leave that to my photographer.
- I think of my encaustic work as being three-dimensional. Many of my encaustic pieces have barbed wire, nails and other materials sticking out from the surface, and the surface is often scraped and gouged, or polished to a shine. The medium is physical and sculptural for me, and shooting at an angle affirms the three-dimensionality of the piece.
If you think about it, we rarely see a piece of art solely from the front. That’s only for reproductions. In real life, we approach a piece from the side and then align ourselves in front of it. This idea is integral to my handling of the surface and edges on my encaustic pieces.
Here is an example of a larger encaustic piece with barbed wire, photographed straight-on and from an angle. The angle shot shows the scraped and scratched surface.
