Zedist Elephant | Open Edition Print

This was the first true Zedist piece I created and deserves special mention. I got the idea of combining textured surfaces with other realistic images by looking at a dry lake bed in the Southern California desert. All of the mud was curling up and separated into organized shapes and patterns, giving the surface a broken, three-dimensional texture. I made a series of paintings using pieces of cut up sheet metal (shown here) that were bent into curled chips, like sun baked mud or dried flower petals. These pieces were arranged on top of a similar parent image below and worked nicely to provide more surface area for the eye to explore upon the sculpted form on top of the canvas plane. The concept of combining two separate forms into one synergistic image was first impressed upon me by the photographic darkroom work of photomontage artist Jerry Uelsmann at the University of Florida. Around the same time, I also became aware of and seduced by the paranoiac critical method of one thing tran