Forest Protectors Revealed

After completing the panoramic "Hidden Nature" series, I continued to wonder about the issue of invisibility/hiding and exactly how far I had taken that - such that the figures perhaps have become a too-faint hallucination against the jungle foliage pattern. Had the background itself became the subjective foreground overwhelming a viewer's ability to decipher / discover the (intentionally concealed) subjects?

I set out to make work that in some ways was a visual simplification of "Hidden Nature." In these new pieces, the Forest Protectors would be less concealed, faces revealed within the chaotic canopy leaves and branches.

Forest Spirits 01

Forest Spirits 02

Forest Spirits 03

Forest Spirits 04

Follow-on note: for the Upstream Gallery's "Small Works 2020" show in January, I had these images output onto a metallic white paper, creating quite a nice optical depth.

Forest Protectors Embodied

I liked the faces of the Forest Spirit protectors emerging through the leaf canopy of the forest. I started to think about how in reality, the leaves and branches would be swaying or shuffling in the wind, constantly changing the appearance and visibility of the Forest Protectors. With an eye towards earlier forest Goddess animations, I played around with similar a layered approach, with the addition of sound, to build new animations (saved as short .mp4 videos). Here is a sample of a few:

Note that the SW tools I use included IOS apps including D'efect, GlitchArt, and Hyperspektiv. Final layering and sequencing is done in PS on my Mac.

Shaman Dreamtime

While collecting forest canopy images showing inherent "crown shyness" (the observation of trees' branches not interfering with each other - rather leaving open space between each tree in the high canopy) for use in my Forest Spirits pieces, I decided to expand upon the previous playful images of myself with antlers. This time inter-connecting / contrasting the free floating leaf camouflage pattern with highly abstract, yet uniquely organic, "crown shyness" clumping of the upper forest canopy.