Art Gallery

The UUCC Gallery showcases art from the congregation’s many visual artists. Click Previous Exhibits to enjoy more art. Click on each image to see it in full size.

Abstract and Surreal

Photographs by Tom Hackett

At some point in the last ten years, I realize that I was not going to stand out as primarily a landscape photographer. I decided to broaden my focus (so to speak) to include projects that did not require me to get up before the crack of dawn or hike miles into the wilderness to make a photograph that was pleasing to me and perhaps others.

Here I have on display photographs that are unrecognizable without some clue about how they were made (abstract) or created from combinations of other photographs to make a (often humorous) point (surreal). I’ll add some more words about the techniques at the bottom.

The camera sees light as three discrete colors: red, green and blue. Where they are all present in equal proportions, the result is gray. We call that “unsaturated” or “desaturated.” When one or two predominate, the result is color. The amount of “saturation” in the color is determined by the magnitude of the differences among the three colors. Bluestone (the photographs were originally individual slabs or bluestone making up Uptown Kingston sidewalks) appears gray or bluish-gray to most of us. But there are subtle differences among the grays. By using software to enhance those subtle differences, we get more saturated colors.

The “Great Salt Lake” photograph was enhanced similarly from an original photograph made in a shallow part of the lake.

“Unknown topography” is really just another bluestone photograph, but it looked to me like a satellite picture of some wilderness area.

“Untitled” has not been significantly altered from the original photograph of an interior wall of the “El Morro” fort in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I imagine the wall is perpetually damp.

Although I have not played in several years (except through a video game), I used to be a fairly decent Bridge player. Bridge requires four people, which was hard to come by when under quarantine during Covid-19.

As a child, I thought it would be neat to have a tree house. So I made one. The fireplace and stairs to the upper floor are from the house I grew up in.

I read a book entitled Why Time Flies. I still don’t get why one would do that.