Featured Artist Mark Reiners

Photographer Mark Reiners creates contemplative images inspired by Ansel Adams’ grand landscapes, using his own distinctive style. View more of his portfolio on his website.

 

 

I would like to use these brief comments for two purposes. First, to convey a sense for the origins and evolution of my passion for fine art photography. Second, to offer a glimpse of my rather ambitious objectives as a fine art photographer.

 

 

In retrospect, I realize that the origins of my path long precede ever owning a camera. As a child of the American Midwestern heartland, I drew a lucky hand in an important respect. Home was so close to the countryside that a walk of a single block put me amid open, undeveloped fields. Long walks, especially in summer and autumn, filled me with a soaring expansive spirit. That deep, early sense of connection with the earth and sky became a profoundly important harbinger.

 

 

This was infinitely amplified some years later over several long summer family vacation journeys. Having relatives on both coasts, I was transfixed during the thousands of miles of driving to those destinations. While younger brothers and older sister engaged in typical chatter, games and horseplay, not I. Rarely speaking, with an immersed sense of the insatiable, I visually drank in every passing mile of varying landscapes. Then the unanticipated epiphany.

 

 

Living in Boulder Colorado ten years later, a friend and I drove to the San Juan Mountains for a day hike. The tiny Kodak pocket camera I bought for the occasion was almost an afterthought. By the end of that transcendentally beautiful Indian summer day, it became the forethought of a life changed.

 

 

Beyond the cloudless sky, the apparent luminescence of Aspen leaves at the seasonal zenith of their color, air so pristine that it nearly stung to breath, and a series of images that, to this day, I would give almost anything to have captured with large-format, state-of-the-art optics, I realized three things. One was the near euphoria embodied in the sense of exploration, adventure and anticipation that any instant could present a visual subject of sublime beauty. Second, I realized that I instinctively felt with my whole being how to look and to see such sublimity. And third, I realized that the possibilities entailed in this ability were virtually infinite.

 

 

The goals? Goal one: chase that sublime infinity. First, by realizing three clear portfolio projects. Each so rich and expansive that I envision them as lifelong. Each fecund with this prospect: dozens, if not hundreds, of gallery and collector-worthy images.

 

 

Goal two is to logistically serve goal one. How? Strive to create the financial, operational, inspirational and spiritual freedom needed to devote full time to that chase. Use of Patreon, and other means of identifying and soliciting serious and sustained individual, corporate and other patronage, and/or professional management toward this end, is on my agenda.

 

 

Because the aesthetic of these planned portfolios so closely fuses the naturalistic, the graphic, and the quasi-abstract, they lend themselves extremely well to embodiment in media beyond merely conventional photographic prints. These include murals and fused/stained glass, with exciting interior design and/or architectural implementations.

 

Mark Reiners invites you to follow on Instagram.

 

 

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