Artist Portfolio Magazine’s 10 Art Competition

Raymond Charette – Gatineau, Canada

Artist’s statement

Like many others, I began taking pictures in black and white. The idea of stopping time and showing what I had seen was fascinating to me. And beautiful even without colour.
I am a mature photographer. I am self-taught. I produce fine art limited edition prints.

Like paintings, photographs are simply pictures. Fine art landscape photographs usually depict grand vistas in exotic locations – basically post cards. That’s not what I do. Firstly, because I don’t live near one of those locations nor do I often travel there. Secondly, because where I live, in Gatineau, Québec, there are few grand vistas. However, Nature abounds there are plenty of lakes, streams, rocks, and trees near where I live; and so, those are the pictures that I make throughout the seasons.

My pictures are about seeing and looking. Like the bits of Nature they depict, they don’t tell much of a story, they don’t mean anything, they aren’t tied to a cause. Let the viewer figure them out.

Nature is a messy place. Still, I manage to isolate parcels of it that are somewhat less jumbled. My compositions are simple. My pictures are sharp, clear, saturated and contrasty. They are almost abstract, yet they are necessarily figurative. My pictures are not geographical. They show what I saw in my mind’s eye.

I work slowly. My images are in a format that allows me to rework them, sometimes quite a lot. Since digital processing has come along, I really enjoy printing in colour. I can reveal chromatic detail that often goes unnoticed. So far, I guess I’m more of an expressionist with regards to the use of colour in my prints.

My work is organized around series of images. The images featured here depict water’s reflections and transparencies, a theme other visual artists have explored. This is my take on it. There are twelve images in this series. I use the tools that allow me to make the best picture I can, including any piece of hardware or software that I can master. I try to keep things simple.

Nature, here and now, while it lasts.