Commentary on Water Brass Art production
The brasses take an image from water.
I have little control over how the image turns out.
Where and how the brass is placed effects the image because.
A brass placed under a rock in a flowing stream shows a flow like a long silk scarf blowing in the wind.
Brass placed in a fast flowing stream tethered by a string where the brass floats without touching anything but the water produces the high frequency colours of blue & indigo.
A brass placed under a drip at angle produced another image. See The Shrine series > examples, images 17 & 18 @ https://www.waterbrassart.com/gallery-1/
A brass horizontal to the drip yet another, see Eye of the Storm > examples, images 27 & 33 @ https://www.waterbrassart.com/gallery-2/
The brasses do not just corrode, or oxidize, they have depositions on them some look like iron oxide in that they are orange and powdery when dry. Others have crystals embedded, which look like Quartz others have bright red tiny flecks that look like Ruby.
We have not analysed these surface materials to know what they are.
We did take a sample to Leeds University, to their scanning electron microscope, but it was inconclusive.
Photographing the brasses and illuminating them is an art.
You need command of how a camera works then the piece has to be lit.
Surface lighting produces a flat image.
Background lighting starts to give depth.
Sometimes I will have a piece of paper with a led shining on it 7 feet behind the camera or a directed LED. In the two pictures above, I shone several LEDs onto the brass directly. The LEDs image is blurred because the camera is focused on the brass surface.
I did this because I had recently read Goethe’s theory of colour, where magic happens at the edges, colour appears at the edges, then I wanted to mix some colours.
The frequency of the LEDs looks pure but I have no means to test that at the moment. We look at darkness through light or the opposite.
John Byde