11 Questions with Doug Winter

Doug Winter is a fine art and editorial photographer focusing on social awareness working in both abstract and representational photography. He is best known for his large-scale abstract photographic images on dye-infused aluminum panels. "I'm a curious perfectionist," he has said. "The work is inspired by light and reflective colors in nature. The emphasis of my work is creating textured atmospheres to instill a sense of quiet and meditative balance in the viewer." Doug's work is informed directly from the untamed complexity and beauty of life, and the resilience of nature is a constant source of inspiration. He uses colors that reference light and energy, creating a visual expression of distorted reality. Companies and individuals collect his artwork within the entertainment, social media, and information technology communities.

www.sensory.dougwinterstudio.com | @doug_winter_studio

 ARTIST STATEMENT

Sight unto itself is unique. When perfect vision becomes impaired and dissolves into blurred structures and undefined edges, how does it affect established cognition of objects, homes, and places? Do the blurred contours of life meld and wash over time-worn memories of objects and station? Freshly opened and squinting eyes reveal a world is taking shape as loosely defined structures. These inflections of color and light inform our lives, giving us meaning, distraction, joy, and pain. Collectively our visual boundaries build over time to allocate language, love, and kindness. These are the questions that inform my work, inspired by my father's loss of eyesight two years before his death.

While caring for my father, I'd ask him to describe in detail what he saw, measuring if his sight was better or worse, depending on the day. He would describe the shapes and colors of objects and landscapes. Our discussions informed my imagination, and I began recreating these visual memories.

This body of work speaks to the separate, shared, and unique connection degraded eyesight has to memory, color contours, and light and how collectively they comprise a nomenclature of personal reality and history.

My large-scale abstract photographic images on dye-infused aluminum panels are informed directly from the untamed complexity and beauty of life. The resilience of nature is a constant source of inspiration. I use colors that reference light and energy, creating a visual expression of distorted reality.

A modified lens distorts the shape and color of the objects I photograph, pushing a formal object into a range of emotions and colors. The simplified abstract forms break down visual barriers and allow a wider audience to appreciate the viewing's meditative act. Each image is an organized impression of memories and sensations—a colorful daydream displayed for the community to experience. The luminous panels are durable and will last for over 100 years.

I'm a curious perfectionist. My purpose is to attain a broader audience, bringing art to unexpected locations while giving back to the community and instilling creation's spontaneity.

INTERVIEW

Could you tell us a little more about your background?

Pieces of my youth fell through a small town eleven miles north of Denver, Colorado, where rows of cookie-cutter homes sat silhouetted against the golden-blue Colorado sunset. The planned housing subdivision I grew up in was an island anchored thirty miles east of the Rocky Mountains. Inviting and colorful, the Rockies provided a reliable environment to grow up and out of myself. 

The subdivisions around Denver were awkwardly out of place and mocked the Rocky Mountain landscape that lay variegated along the horizon, salient and broken. Their magnificent protective presence was a constant source of companionship. The land outside of the suburb was rugged, rural, and filled with agricultural wonder. It's there I escaped. I have memories of peddling fast into the wheat field farms, my bicycle humming as I raised my arms overhead. I would reach to the sun, my hands shadowing the light from my face, thin air filling each breath as I snaked my way along dirt trails that paralleled lake shores and irrigation canals. Ghost-quiet tilled soil fields immune to the passage of time never budged as night fell over and over. When I would return home to the community, everyone held so dearly. I would brush the dirt from my Levi's. 

Thankful to live inside a home and the stability it provided, fragments of adolescent angst drove me away to peddle faster into this natural wonder and emotionally disappear. Each year I observed progress eating into the precious acreage more quickly than the year before. Change of this kind was difficult and challenging for me to contemplate.  On my sixteenth birthday, I received a gift that changed the direction of my life, a 35mm film camera. Peering through the rectangular viewfinder changed my perception of the world around me. I often slung the glass and metal box over my shoulder on my way to rural adventures. I photographed landscapes, wildlife, and abstracted details I found in nature. I used these photographs as inspiration for drawing and painting. I didn't think of myself as a photographer then. I thought of myself as an artist. I still think of myself this way. 

After graduating from high school, I enrolled in the Colorado Institute of Art's photography program, graduating a few years later with a "Best Portfolio" commendation. Immediately following graduation, I moved to Washington, D.C., and began my career frequently photographing significant events at the White House. Opportunities to photograph two U.S. presidents, heads of state, diplomats, and celebrities helped me hone my skills and editorial photography instincts. Through these interactions and assignments, living and working on Capitol Hill and the White House, I witnessed the power of photography and how it can raise awareness and hope. These collective experiences allowed me to see the world as a large family. I still see the world this way. 

Over the years, I've created hundreds of editorial photo illustrations for magazines, newspapers, and websites. This investigational curiosity gave way to a litany of experimental, historical, and abstract photographic practices.  

How do you describe your creative concept, and what inspired your artistic expression?

Two years before his death, my father lost his vision. My creative concept and the inspiration of my artistic expression for the "Optics | Acoustics" body of work was witnessing this loss of my father's eyesight. My father struggled with his eyesight for many years. In the 1990s, he had a procedure to replace the lenses in both eyes. Years later, he lost sight in his right eye due to a severe car accident. As he aged, the lens in his "seeing-eye" aged too, and after 25 years, the lens detached and caused severe problems. Doctors scheduled a lens replacement surgery.

I was traveling by car across the country with my spouse the day after his lens replacement surgery. We planned an extended visit and stayed with my sister as we waited for the bandages to come off to discover if he was able to see correctly or be left without sight. My father, being a retired engineer, explained every aspect of the procedure. He told us how the lens worked, its position in his eye, how it operates, and why these lenses wear out.

"It's a lot like a glass element in a camera lens," he explained. When the bandages came off, and he opened his eyes, he said, "I can see! It's slightly blurry, but I can see it."

My wife and I left for home and drove back to California, happy to know he would pull through. Unfortunately, the healing process did not go as planned, and a week or so later, he developed an eye infection, which caused the eye to malfunction. He woke up to discover his eyesight vanished. God, deaf to our prayers, took his sight away like a thief in the night. I returned weeks later to aid with his care and help pack up his home and move him into assisted living. My father lived in the same area I grew up in as a kid. The rural surroundings and rugged landscape had become a faded memory, bulldozed away by progress.

My sister lived there too and cared for our father much more than I did. As the sunset. As the sun slipped beneath the horizon, my sister and I walked around East Lake near his home in the golden summer evenings. We reminisced about the bicycles we used to ride and our neighborhood friends and how all the time behind us seemed close, like yesterday. While caring for our father, I'd ask him to describe what he saw, measuring if his sight was better or worse, depending on the day. He would describe the shapes and colors of objects and landscapes in photographic terms, blurry, out of focus, like a broken camera. The discussions with my father informed my imagination, and after his death, I began recreating these visual memories. He transitioned a few months after we moved him into a care home.

In working on this project for the last year, I found making these images kept me close to my father, and it helps me work through the grief of this loss. My father and I were not close. We talked a few times a year, and he sent a card or two for birthdays or holidays. I was on the "outside" until the end of his life when he let me "in." I've found that's when people need each other the most. Before he passed, I'd sit with him quietly for long hours; apparitions of sight and vision mixed with childhood memories came and went.  Internal dialogue and many questions began to form in my mind.

Through my conversations with my father, I realized that sight unto itself is unique. What I see or perceive you may not. When perfect vision becomes impaired and dissolves into blurred structures, landscapes, and undefined edges, how does it affect established cognition of objects, homes, and places? At that moment, I followed the vision into the new.

What are you trying to communicate with your blurred effect?

It's not an "effect"; it's an interpretation. To emulate my father's failing sight, I modified a lens for my camera. I approached the lens modification, much like it was a human eye. I altered the glass element's distance to the focal plane. This alteration made the lens unable to focus or perform appropriately in the hope that it would mimic my father's lens, the loss of his sight and how it had been affected through the damaging eye infection.

My camera lens transfigures and distorts the shape and color of the objects I photograph, pushing a formal object into a range of emotions and colors. The distorted lens sees the world in the same way, my father's eye witnessed a distorted reality of his surroundings after the loss of his eyesight. I thoroughly investigated the visual questions I outlined for myself when I began making this vast body of work. I continually adjust the project's direction based on my initial outline and artist statement.

Do the blurred contours of life meld and wash over time-worn memories of place and station? Do these inflections of color and light inform our lives, giving us meaning, distraction, joy, and pain? Freshly opened and squinting eyes reveal a world is taking shape as loosely defined entities. Collectively do our visual boundaries build over time to allocate language, love, and kindness?

Optics | Acoustics speaks to the separate, shared, and unique connection degraded eyesight has to memory, color contours, and light and how collectively they comprise a vocabulary of personal reality and history. My large-scale abstract aluminum panels draw breath from the untamed complexity, beauty, and brutality of life events. The resilience of nature and the human condition is a constant source of inspiration.

What do you see as the strengths of your artistic expression, visually and conceptually?

The strengths of the artistic expression, both visually and conceptually, are in the simplified abstract forms, shapes, and colors. They relate to daily functions in life that we take for granted and don't contemplate too deeply.

The process breaks down the perceived truth and beauty of visual barriers and grants a broader audience to discover the meditative act of observation. Sitting with each image for an extended time allows the spectator to disengage from their presence, and if they wish, bend their mind toward reflective contemplation.

Each image is an organized impression of memories and sensations—a colorful daydream displayed for an individual viewer or a community to experience. My purpose is to attain a broader audience, bringing art to unexpected locations while giving back to the community and instilling the spontaneity of creation.

Could you tell our readers about your creative process?

To put me in my father's range of vision, I placed distressed cellophane or wax paper over my eyes. I walked in sock-covered feet through the halls of my father's house, the carpet squeaking mouse-like as I bump from walls at times. I was forcing my mind and senses into a hypothetical loss of vision. The various media over my eyes distort reality. I turn my surroundings into the ocular nightmare my father encountered daily. As I walked through the halls and tried to fix myself a meal, solid objects became shapes morphing other than usual. Television became a beautiful window with mottled colors and shapes that I imagined were houses against a blue sky. In front of my father's house, children riding their bikes in the court appeared as birds flying and skimming a lake's surface. A blossom on a tree was reduced to green, cyan, orange, and red colors. I dove headfirst into a helpless power of discovery. The perceived reality, gone.

Drawing breath from this real experience, I hold my altered camera to the sky. Its shadow was shading my eyes as I begin photographing. At times slowly moving counterclockwise guided only by the sound of the wind as leaves. Using the light and colorful textures of my environment as meditative energy, I capture pieces of colorful dreams tuning out the circling world, opening my heart while making a single photograph.

Latent shadows imprint themselves forever on light-sensitive celluloid. The process is familiar, a lullaby from my youth, and how I would explore and photograph nature. I found everyday comfort in these actions, the camera, and I sharing secrets again.

What was the most challenging part of this project?

One of the most challenging aspects of this project was modifying a lens that works with my camera and interprets the defective perception of a human eye.

Mechanical imagery with a vacancy to altered social aspects of vision was my objective. In summation: Illusional truth. When a camera lens sees out of focus objects, it captures circular artifacts. These circular anomalies are not present in human eyesight. I was frustrated as I produced photograph after photograph, capturing images that a camera sees, not what the human eye saw. It took a long time to finally create a lens that modified vision in the way that I wanted.

Held up in thought, working through, and focusing on human distortions, I found my way. In recreating diminished vision, I removed all evidence of a mechanical camera and lens, pairing the images down to a human ocular response.

Building off a tiny initial success, I discovered a proper approach in and around each image. My process functions currently are unpredictable, and at times it fails to produce a single image.

Another challenging aspect of this project is trusting my artistic heart while investigating another person's reality, especially when they are no longer living. Allowing myself to let go and break every rule I followed or learned in my photographic training.

My photography education was technical and commercial. Selective focus and illustrative work were frowned upon and rewarded with a low mark. I've always had one foot grounded in the commercial and editorial world, and my heart and imagination are grounded firmly in the conceptual world. Letting go and breaking those rules released the process and freed me.

Each day I lean into the "new," embracing hope and the possibility every photograph holds.

What obstacles do you face in making and exhibiting your work during this challenging time of COVID-19?

The obstacles I'm facing in making and exhibiting my work are few, save my patience. I'm fortunate. Like almost everyone, I must work remotely. My entire art practice has shifted and changed, but it's been the worst of times and the best of times.

Figuring out how to do everything from my home studio after the country locked down was difficult. Dye infused aluminum panel printing, shipping, looking at proofs are hard to do from a distance, but they can be done. Every step was a type of roadblock, and through the frustration and acceptance of our brave new world, I found an incredible partner. They help with all my proof printing and shipping needs. They build wooden crates on-site for the larger pieces I sell, and they insure and ship internationally.

Organizers of three exhibitions canceled their exhibitions indefinitely. Not rescheduled, not moved on-line, just canceled. In accepting and embracing the new world around us, I'm currently experiencing a personal renaissance. An exciting biproduct of the pandemic is the emergence of online galleries and broader viewership of artwork for everyone.

Clear communication about the Optics | Acoustics work has been a little tricky. When the audience reads the term "photograph" and assume "prints" or "editions" are available. The Optics | Acoustics images are one-of-a-kind. One original, just like a painting, just like eyesight, precious, and unique.

How do you see your photographic art evolving in the next five years?

I plan to continue pushing the boundaries of the abstract image and exploring more ways to engage the audience of my work. I'd like to embrace art as meditative studies, creating imagery that has the power to bring people together and allow us a pathway or starting point to healing emotional wounds. To aid in relaxation of the human mind and alleviate anxiety, depression, and self-harm.

When I began working on Optics | Acoustics, I sat for long periods looking into the images I created, experiencing a feeling a peaceful calm; a biproduct of the work is relaxation and comfort in the viewing process.

What advice would you give someone looking to pursue a career in photography today?

Believe in yourself, and never waiver. There are so many options to have a career in photography. You can be a curator, editor, historian, or gallerist with a focus on photography. Be open to everything around you and read, read, read, study, study, study.

The best part of my career as an artist and a photographer are the incredible friendships, impossible situations I found myself in, and the people I've experienced along the way. It takes time to establish yourself and a routine but be consistent. In your actions with yourself and the promises you make to others, be consistent. Show up early and respect others' time and remember, "caring is doing." Anyone can say they will do something, but when you consistently follow through, you build trust, and trust in the business of photography goes a long way.

Share something you would like the world to know about you?

I am a curious perfectionist.