When I started doing photography, it quite soon brought me a growing dissatisfaction with color. Whether it was street photography or a studio set, the color was never enough. I couldn’t get enough color out of photo retouching as well - too much color was destroying the sense of reality in the photographs. And so it was until I let myself go on with this destructive retouching and turned a photograph into more like a drawing or painting. That become my graduation project called Saturation which was made completely out of indelicate, destructive retouching.
Later, while walking the street and thinking about that, I noticed a splash of gasoline on asphalt. It was shiny and colourful, but a plain photograph of it wouldn’t be interesting to anyone. Making it oversaturated wouldn’t work too, but then I tried using corrective brushes, oversaturating one part and desaturating another, and it did work and turned into a whole project. A couple of weeks later I made planets out of parking stoppers in the same way.
After that I started imagining first primitive pictures of hills under the blue sky, sea waves with flying seagulls - all made out of cracks on asphalt. I started using the exposition brush as a pencil and temperature brush for coloring inside the contours. (As if the camera settings - exposition and white balance - were completely off the charts, but not for the whole picture, only for parts of it).
Picture by picture I realised this was a way of painting and it has a lot of expressive potential. Then came peeling walls, splashes of paint on a floor, bits of concrete on pavement - one man’s trash and another man’s treasure.
For me one big difference between a photograph and a painting is the tactile sensation. All photographs feel the same, and paintings are different from one another. Because of this I started exploring the ways of making the prints interesting not only to the eyes, but also to the fingertips.
I tried tracing paper and watercolour paper, I tried UV printing on polystyrene, wood, metal, canvas and vinyl. But I needed something else for my asphalt paintings. One of the works that based on the photograph of cracked concrete gave me an idea to produce a concrete panel and print on it. It didn’t work in the beginning - the paint didn’t adhere very well, but we’ve found the right balance of varnish, primer and paint to make it work. And this is how three kinds of art - photography, painting and street art - joined in one object.
