The Baram House Magazine featured my work in the “A Strange Summer” issue this month. The interview was fun, and their questions are both curious and thought-provoking. The conversation allowed for deep thought about my past, present, and future. 

The more I write and sit quietly with the work I’m creating, the more freely it is to generate abstracts of esthetic accuracy to the artist statement set of rules I outlined to complete the project. 

This project published here, “Father to Son,” is retitled “Optics and Acoustics,” which will be more easily apparent when viewed as an entire body of images. 

The titles of the images are in flux now and in consideration to make full-length sentences. The titles will allow the viewer to find a sense of character in the person reflected in the abstract images. 

The staff at the Baram House magazine are helpful, kind, and thoughtful. Please read and subscribe, the magazine is beautiful and a useful way to escape in these uncertain times.

Please enjoy, click on this link to read the full feature.

Protests for equality, peace, redirecting police funds, and the removal of monuments dedicated to oppressive historical figures in American saw our nation and the world clash, burn and unite. We look for justice and the right for a person with darker skin to be counted as equal and their lives to matter. Black lives are disproportionally jailed, disciplined, and killed. Black men and women (LGTBQ+) are losing their freedoms every day to police profiling and white on black violence. You can read the data here. 

As an artist, I’m deeply affected by my environment and the world around me. Reports of friends and family being wrongfully accused and jailed and watching George Floyd killed on TV influence my daily thoughts. I am driven to work through it by making art based on these aggressive feelings and my passion for raising social awareness.

I slowly read and work through the reports and begin to create the work as a way to process and level out my own emotions and understanding of an issue I can never solve. It’s an internal and visual dialogue with myself filled with guilt, regret, compassion, and love.

Due to my health restrictions and the COVID -19 pandemic, I work from my studio, and photographing people has ceased. 

This body of work is the visual skin tone of the police officers of white on black violence, their senseless brutality, and the victims’ skin tone, with the Caucasian skin tone over black, or white over black.

The series has the working title, “tone-deaf.” I look at pigment and melanin levels based on the death and abuse of Black citizens in our collective community.

I’ll be posting the pieces as I work through them on Instagram feed once a week.

See how you can support or help your own community by following this link.

Please listen to understand and not just simply respond, through dialogue and compassion, common ground can be forged. 

Thank you for your continued support. 

Doug

https://www.singulart.com/en/artist/doug-winter-4779

My ongoing project “Optics | Acoustics” was selected by Arts Letters & Numbers for an online exhibition on their Facebook and Instagram social media accounts. The group at ALN are very kind collaborators.

Arts Letters & Numbers is a non profit arts, education, and publishing organization dedicated to creating creative exchanges across a wide range of disciplines including Architecture, Visual Arts, Theatre Arts, Film, Music, Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences. Arts, Letters & Numbers conducts workshops in educational and cultural institutions worldwide in collaboration with theatre companies, artists, writers, actors, musicians and filmmakers. It operates an ongoing series of educational workshops, performances and film productions at ‘The Mill’ located in Upstate, NY.

https://www.facebook.com/artslettersandnumbers/

https://www.facebook.com/artslettersandnumbers/https://www.singulart.com/en/artist/doug-winter-4779

NDMOA Art in Isolation compiles curated artwork created in isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic. My artwork, along with hundreds of others, are part of an experimental work where in all the work submitted is made into a large quilt titled #alonetogether

“Our goal is to create one large piece made up of all of your individual images.” from the NDMA press release.

ART IN ISOLATION
April, 2020 – when we can gather in groups again

We asked that you submit images of what you are doing to be creative in this time of social distancing, and you answered our call. We are honored to receive an outpouring of images coming from around the world. 

So far we’ve recieved over one-thousand images from hundreds of people. The list below only represents a fraction of the people that have submitted. We’ll update the list as fast as we can. 

As a part of this experimental exhibition our goal is to create one large piece made up of all of your individual images. NDMA press release. 

The work I submitted: “Snow Day #8”

Update: September, 17 2020

I entered the COVID-19 quarantine and everything came crashing down. My photography business centered around photographing people and representational photographs. A three year project just stopped in one day. I was left with virtually empty hands asking myself, “What will do?”  Thoughtfully I contemplateed in silence. I’m not just a photographer of people, but my conceptual photography and photographs would carry me through to see the light on the other side of this pandemic’s darkness.

Thoughts of my father and caring for him as he withered away passively came and went. While watching over him I had a project idea about our relationship roughly titled, Father to Son. I jotted and doodled notes while sitting with him. When the abstract images are created, I think of him and I choose good memories of our connections as a palette for this visual journey.

All this was more than six months ago. I’m still in isolation as our all of us. Thank you NDMOA for taking the first steps with me on one of the most important journey’s of my life.

Visit the museum home page here.