My artist statement

I am an observer. I have been my entire life.

I was born into a huge family with loads of sorrow and not much else. From an early age I learned to watch - quietly - from the corner. As I grew older and developed the skills to articulate what it was I saw, I turned my vision towards writing, pursuing a degree in Creative Writing and Linguistics. I furthered my training by also studying design and typography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. My eye for observation has carried over to my professional life as well. Be it parsing conversations with drug addicts for the truth lurking behind what they were telling me to monitoring client accounts for spending anomolies, I have always been on the lookout for the less obvious.

My creative vision tends towards the Macro. I thoroughly enjoy examining things at the most extreme level. many of my favorite photographs are those where the true subject of the image is not what it would seem to be: A picture of a bottle cap looks like so much more to me... A close up of an orange looks a bit like a neural-net. The quick snap of a friend looks at first like a portrait but to me is a fantastic picture of flowers. Sometimes I will snap a picture just for the mere interesting nature of the texture.






I found the exhibit of books at BC to be compelling. The way that a familiar object that often times is instantly readable [pun acknowledged but not intended] as a book but at the same time utterly and completely something else really resonated with me. I like the Trompe l'oeil aspect of the artists books the best. Was it a head cabbage? That's not a book, it's a bunch of teabags... Fascinating. It is that fooling of the eye, the guiding of ones gaze is what I find most interesting. I think I succeeded just a little with my picture of the ice:


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Recently, I have developed a keen interest in Tilt Shift and Miniature faking photography. Here is an photographic example:



And here is a video example:

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

I enjoy the way these images engage the mind and make it work in ways beyond what we are programed to see. I really like how - through manipulation of color saturation, focus, and depth of field - what would be an ordinary snapshot becomes something compelling (and at some level challenging). It is a technique I had hoped to employ more successfully with my ice transformation images, and I hope to explore more and more of this technique going forward. I could imagine really fantastic results when utilized in the creation of an artist's book.