Commentary on the Beneath the Surface series

"Nick Kavoukles' work is the next iteration of nature photography, mixing art and image in a way that respects and illuminates both nature and photography.  The result is incredible, absorbing, delicate, transformative landscapes that are as rich and insightful as dreams."

Julia Mair
Vice-President, Television and Media
Wildlife Conservation Society
Producer, National Geographic Society
Explorer Television Series

"Nikitas Kavoukles, in his digital pigment print Reaching I, conveys an impression of a radiantly colorful world, a world in which beauty and hope can be caught in a moment in time, manipulated and transformed into insatiable beauty, but never divorced from its original source in nature.

[Dale] Chihuly and Kavoukles unite the external world of nature into masterpieces of radiant light.  For all of their technological manipulation, the net effect is one of pure visual expression, liberated from the socio-political content of artistic predecessors, returning to an inner synthesis of artifice and nature . . . a dualism of balance and harmony with which all artists must struggle."

Darrell D. Davisson, Ph.D.
From the book Art After the Bomb: Iconographies of Trauma in Late Modern Art    AuthorHouse, 2009

Original Image

                    Final Image

Detail

Images and Text Copyright © Nikitas Kavoukles 2004-2009

About the Beneath the Surface Series

The Beneath the Surface series is an exploration of the relationships between the real and the perceived, the actual and the reflected, the seen and the imagined. The images all have their origins in photographs of the natural world; but Mr. Kavoukles reapproaches photography using digital tools in a fine art context.

Mr. Kavoukles treats his original photographs as "underpaintings" that contain the essential elements of a composition. He then fashions his images into a new work. As a result, his finished pigment prints are far more than reproductions of the seminal photograph. Colors have been digitally softened or intensified; elements have been added or deleted, painted in or out; passages have been moved, enhanced, or invented. (See example above.) The process entails detailed, time-intensive handwork, as we would expect in any original work of fine art.

Mr. Kavoukles draws heavily on his experience working with oils, watercolors, pastels, and etchings to capture the rich, painterly look of his pigment prints. Each is intended to engage the senses—to capture an emotion, to evoke a faint memory of other worlds, or to subtly shift the consciousness of the viewer. For this reason they are supremely pleasurable to contemplate for extended periods of time. While his work offers layers of meaning the mind can discover, Mr. Kavoukles achieves this depth through an attention to beauty and the engagement of the heart.

Artists are always in dialogue with their work and their media; and the digital world is an emerging medium that is very much in transition. On a more technical level, the Beneath the Surface series is intended to showcase the fine-art potential of the new digital tools and is a natural evolution of Mr. Kavoukles’ work in more traditional media.

The pigment prints that comprise the Beneath the Surface series are printed in archival-quality inks on 100% cotton rag paper. Each image is limited to an edition of 25 or fewer.

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