new art from Trep: Untitled
 

http://www.geocities.com/sectorblue/home/columns1.jpg

Untitled is a recent series of images I'm working on. The images, captured with a digital camera, often border on the generic banality of formalistic photographic compositions - architecture, industry, downtown plazas, gas stations, car interiors. What I feel texturizes and charges them are the superimposed texts over a Guassian blur field within the images, transforming them into 'psychological moments' for me, as the texts are highly personal, some of them extracted from my diary and dealing with such issues as family, isolation, identity, depleted expectations, emptiness, and loss.

And what I also found intriguing after starting this series is that it reminds me of current advertisements in the subway trains, on buses, and in magazines - a subversion of sorts, the idea of private pain, experiences, thoughts, and reflections 'oozing' out into the public sphere, an exposition of one individual's complexities through the graphic pimpings of 'remedies' to momentarily satisfy desires and alleviate social insecurities.

I'd love some feedback, so feel free to comment.

I am afraid to say anything because I may inadvertently insult you...

• I hate the font. I hate it with bile. Grrrr. It is downright plain in a bad sort of way - more so in the pictures than in the rest of the site.
• The colors of the letters are not helping the general composition - they grate against it and compete for attention - again, in a bad sort of way.
• The overlay is too centered - clashing with the off-kilter background.
• The sharp outlines of the blur and the aforementioned color and font really don't do the photos justice. It looks like you found the photos with Google and then garnished them in Paint(tm) - they are too good for the treatment they are receiving.

Otherwise, the stuff of the endeavor is admirably potent. Just make the thoughts work with the photos, rather than against them.

Yeah, good points. Like I said, I just started this series. Thankfully I saved them as working files I can go back and fiddle with over and over until I'm satisfied with them.

http://www.geocities.com/sectorblue/...umns1vers2.jpg

I've changed the fonts and decided to blur the images more for the text to stand out further.

Definitely better. http://www.gamer.se/_pub_images/foru...ng/thumbup.gif

Well, the main reason the text doesn't stand out for me is the obvious white-on-white. You could bevel, outline, or drop-shadow it, or something similar, but those would all come out pretty corny. My only suggestion would be to position the text over a fairly homogeneous piece of the picture. For example, I think a justified-width block (in that last font) that spanned the width of that front-most column on the right, and was a little bit above center would look nice. But I'm not putting any "art" into it -- just aesthetics :P. If the intention was to force the user to read it word by word (thus taking it in "osmotically," but not consciously), then I guess there's no reason to fix that. :D