Beached

A A A Comments By Marya Summers Thursday, Jun 5 2008

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Pablo Picasso asserted, "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." This is doubly true for someone like photographer Barry Seidman, who spent his adulthood in New York's competitive world of advertising. "Beached," he says, is his solution. After many years garnering awards for his commercial still-life photography for large corporations, Seidman is now working for Mother Nature. Using the bounty of Florida's shores, he has created a series of photographic studies of shells and driftwood. "When you watch kids with shells, they take their time turning and examining them," Seidman says. "That's what I was doing." Both Picasso and Seidman indirectly assert that a willingness to play is all one needs to be an artist. The photographer's sense of fun is communicated in titles like Follow the Leader, an image of small shells lined up behind a larger one. And with the same sense of dreamy leisure in which a kid finds animals in the clouds, Seidman finds them in driftwood. The subject of Impala looks like the antlered animal in midleap. This series of ten images in archival ink on canvas uses the same techniques and lighting methods that sell booze and fast food — finding the beauty in subjects to seduce the viewer while their luminescence induces a meditative calm. (Through July 3 at Meyerhoefer Gallery, 608 Lucerne Ave., Lake Worth. Call 561-533-5332.)

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