Filtered Light

Artist Statement

Thomas Van Nortwick

My interest in photography dates from about ten years ago, when my wife, Mary Kirtz Van Nortwick, gave me my first digital camera and I began taking photos of the flowers in our garden on College Street in Oberlin.  In 2011, I began posting one photo every day on Facebook, a discipline that has helped me to learn more about the medium and my aesthetic preferences. As I took my camera with me on my daily walks through Oberlin, my focus expanded.  I discovered that my eye was drawn to the play of light and color and particularly to how water reflected those properties. Three of the images in the show are from the beautiful reflecting pool on the west side of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, an especially fruitful venue for this kind of subject.  I also began to look anew at buildings on my walks, as vehicles for the play of color, light, and shadow, more as abstract shapes than particular architectural statements.  Several of the images in the show reflect this perspective.  Mary and I moved to Kendal in August 2017, and a whole new world of beauty opened up for me.  Recording the sunrises and sunsets on Rock Pond from our back porch has been an endlessly fascinating experience. Tracing the seasonal changes in the angle of the sun and the quality of the air here on our campus has been a revelation for me.  

When I retired from Oberlin College in June 2016, I decided to experiment with a more sophisticated digital camera. Following the advice of my friend John Seyfried, an exceptionally gifted professional photographer, I bought a Fujifilm X30, which has an array of built-in filters.  I have used one of these filters, which intensifies colors and the contrasts in light, for all the photos in this show.  When I first began using the X30, I bought a book about how to take photographs.  I am generally not someone who likes to master a new device before plunging ahead, but this time I was determined to be more disciplined.  In the first chapter, all about the properties of light, I came across the admonition that I should always aim to reproduce as accurately as possible what I was aiming the camera at. This immediately doomed my self-improvement project, as I realized that, for better or worse, I do not care at all about the accuracy of my images, only that they end up looking interesting and, if possible, beautiful to me.  The phrase “No Filter” is not exemplified by my work. (My original title for the whole show was “Yes, Filter.”)

Finally, I want to acknowledge the superb advice and support I have received from James Ward Peake, known to Kendal residents for his splendid origami creations.  James gave me crucial guidance on the selection of photos for the show and did all the work of arranging for the images to be printed on aluminum, an experiment I would not have been able to carry out without his help.  Without James’s energy and aesthetic judgment this show would never have happened. 

All proceeds from the sale of prints in this show will go to FAVA (Firelands Association for the Visual Arts) in Oberlin.