Rock and Pine
Item
-
Title
-
Rock and Pine
-
Creator
-
Brett Weston
-
Artist ID
-
65
-
Date of Work
-
1972
-
Description
-
Small tree on white bolder in water
-
Category of Media
-
Photograph
-
Media
-
Silverprint
-
Accession Number
-
1977.030
-
Location
-
display, Building: Floor: Room: 2204 Bin: gallery exhibition
-
Date Acquired
-
1977
-
Acquisition Method
-
Purchase
-
Dimensions of Work
-
10.5" x 12.5"
-
Frame Dimensions
-
20.25" x 16.25'
-
Frame Type
-
Steel
-
Donor ID
-
131
-
Artist Bio
-
Brett Weston seemed destined from birth to become one of our greatest American photographic artists. Born in Los Angeles in 1911, the second son of photographer Edward Weston, he had perhaps the closest artistic relationship with his famous father of all four of the Weston sons. In 1925, Edward removed Brett from school and took him to Mexico, where the thirteen year old became his father’s apprentice. Surrounded by revolutionary artists of the day, such as Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and influenced as well by the striking contrast of life in Mexico, it was there that Brett first began making photographs with a small Graflex 3 1/4” x 4 1/4” camera. The introduction to modern art the younger Weston received, via the work of painters Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. unquestionably influenced his sense of form and composition. A quality of design was evident in Brett’s early images of the organic and man-made. He appreciated how the camera transformed subjects close up and how the contrast of black and white further altered the recognition of an object. It is therefore not difficult to understand his tendency to abstraction, a characteristic by which he would be identified throughout his almost seventy year career. Throughout the decades of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Brett Weston’s style changed sharply and was characterized by high contrast, abstract imagery. The subjects he chose were, for the most part, not unlike what interested him early in his career: plant leaves, knotted roots, and tangled kelp. He concentrated mostly on close-ups and abstracted details, but his prints reflected a preference for high contrast that reduced his subjects to pure form. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s Weston spent much of his time in Hawaii where he owned two homes. He would travel back and forth between them, shooting along the way: “l have found in this environment, everything I could want to interpret about the world photographically.” Brett Weston died in Kona, Hawaii, January 22, 1993. Source: http://www.brettwestonarchive.com/brettweston
