Pressing Matters

It turns out you can scan almost anything. Even water drops on the surface of the glass window. And even my hand held just above the glass. I think the image to the right is like a disembodied self portrait.


For the next image, I overlaid a water/hand scan with an arrangement of flowers and leaves from my garden. The Victorian naturalist in me would have been satisfied with just the floral grid, but the artist in me had to add a personal touch. The thin horizontal stripes come from the scanner glass, but I like how they screen the viewer from the objects being looked at.

My last image uses magnolia petals arranged into a fan shape. To get the luminous glow and dark background, I turned out all the lights in the room and left the scanner cover open. The velvety, tactile quality of the petals really comes across in the scan, and it almost looks like an Old Master oil painting. I even like the smudge in the lower right.

Adding the hand and water drops makes for an admittedly strange composition with echoes of the Surrealists' obsession with deconstructing and (artistically) mutilating the body. Maybe this is my sublimated self-destructiveness bubbling to the surface....