Featured Artist Mark Harari

Enter the dreamlike world of photographer Mark Harari, who constructs images from reality and abstraction. Visit his website to see more.

 

 

My practice is a continuance of the non-representational realm of image making. Abstraction, as a way of seeing and making, suits the side of my nature that welcomes the unexpected, the happy accident, the surprise of not knowing what might happen, but knowing when it happens.

 

 

This improvisational approach is complementary to the impulses of planning and design which define my life as an architect and builder. Planning and design use the constraints that define the complicated act of creating buildings to exist in everyone’s public reality—a solemn responsibility.

 

 

My image making tries to create an experience that is personal, between viewer and image. The experience is weightless, since there is no solemn obligation, only the possibility of a meaningful encounter. This encounter brings to the moment, the respective histories, conscious and unconscious, of both viewer and artist. The encounter is successful only when image and viewer find each other sharing a feeling, a dream, memory or other, sometimes unarticulatable, sensation or thought, creating receptivity between the two (viewer and artist).

 

 

Mystery and surprise become the currency employed by the encounter. Seeing is the successful transaction. My image making can be painting, drawing, pastel, photography, printmaking; and often a combination of mediums. I explore various materials on which to fix the image. Papers, films, glass, woods, metals all have differing properties and methods. My process is to develop a piece in a medium, and then further explore what material is best suited for that particular image.

 

 

Sometimes analog, sometimes digital; the primacy of an image, as it reveals itself to me, often suggests the material(s) that best present it. I try not to have a pre-determined assumption about the product. I have realized that improvisation is not an accident. Improvisation is an act of open-ended search, accompanied by my conscious and unconscious ideas, feelings, visions, articulated by the skills I possess in the various media of image making.

 

 

As an artist, my satisfaction comes in stages. First, during the making, when I say to myself, “this has something of interest”, not necessarily knowing what it is. Second, when a viewer says to me, or to another “this is interesting, or beautiful, or mysterious”. Or without saying, senses some significant feeling or thought from the encounter with the image. The best is when someone says they revisit the image and there is often something fresh, new that they had not seen when they looked/saw before.

 

 

The search for the image that interests me often utilizes composite imagery. Manipulating two or more images, sometimes in different media, sometimes on differing materials, superimposing one on the other, seeking the right lighting offers an improvisational process. It becomes a conversation or tango.

 

 

The camera becomes a partner in the process of compositing. The original image has its reality; the place and light conditions are blended to create the resulting image.

 

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