Philipstown artist turns his digital eye on dahlias
As a young photographer working in darkrooms, Dirk Westphal disdained technique in favor of “bolder things,” he recalls. “But even early on, I realized that to create special effects, you had to know your equipment.”
Over the years, he made peace with the digital realm, and on June 2, he will share his manipulated photos of flowers culled from his garden in Dahliamania, an open-studio show in Philipstown.
Westphal says he became enamored with the quirky, colorful flowers — there are no blue hues, for instance — about 10 years ago.
At first, he took a documentary-style approach with a high-powered Zeiss lens. Displeased with the results, he turned to technical wizardry. After placing acrylic over a light box to provide a neutral background or color contrast, he arranged the flowers in patterns.
Each image incorporates at least three layers — close-up, foreground and background — which are altered with Generative Fill, a collaging component of Photoshop that Westphal says he discovered by accident.
“It took three years to get it to do what I want it to do,” he says. “I’m not pressing a button and generating an AI image. The analog version would be multiple exposures on the same sheet of paper or moving the paper or print as it is being exposed, or both. It’s a mashup.”
Although they are printed on metal, the dreamy, textured images look soft to the touch and make it difficult to discern where the photo montage ends and the resemblance to a painting begins. The depth of field, Westphal writes, provides “more for the viewer to see than the naked eye can perceive.”
He achieves the desired results by zooming in on the plant’s eyeball, getting the right light and “cutting the focus in a certain way to limit the sharpness of the near, far and middle photos,” he says.
Sometimes, flowers fill the frame. Other prints look like geographical features on a map, except that the “water” is sometimes red, as in “GRAS (generally regarded as safe).”
Raised in Columbus, Ohio, Westphal opted not to take over his father’s one-man medical practice. Instead, he attended art school in Los Angeles and then moved to the Lower East Side of New York City.
Commercial jobs irked him because shadows are forbidden. “They don’t want people to get distracted,” he says.
Turning his attention to projects that “catalog, elevate and transform seemingly commonplace objects into captivating displays of colorful patterns,” according to his artist’s statement, he scored a hit with photos of goldfish, which he placed in a clear, wedge-shaped acrylic tank to keep them from flitting around too much.
After buying a rundown property in Garrison, he fell in love with the great outdoors and approved when the architect suggested a studio above the garage with a gently tilted roof and picture windows.
“It was a compound in the woods that smelled great,” he says. “I lived in the city all those years and everything up here amazed me, like, ‘Wow, I grew a flower.’ ”
Westphal figures that shiny rock flower anemones in a fish tank would make good subjects but has yet to make them pop. He also photographed many dogs of Philipstown, and his series Flying People captured people barreling off a 10-meter diving board against a deep-blue sky.
Sometimes, he works sans camera and computer, like when wielding a scalpel to cut slivers from colorful Hostess CupCakes and Snoballs released during the holidays to create pieces resembling Amish quilts, which he laminates into acrylic and then photographs.
Like Westphal’s dahlia studies, the snack-cake collages are pretty trippy. He says: “That’s my mission, to make them more interesting than they are in reality.”
Dahliamania will be exhibited from 2 to 6 p.m. on June 2 during an open studio at 302 Indian Brook Road in Garrison. Call 917-754-4184.
