Sun Jul 23, 2023 6:30 pm Honorable Mentions:
Markus Grompe: Funky Beach. A playful mingling of realities and textures.
Luxun54: Rain Forest Safari. A lovely unity of opposites.
Jarek M: a real treat. On the surface - sadness, loss. But - hidden - a view of a shared life and love.
Allen Hart: Reflections: a play on duality. I like how the plants and their reflections are treated as objects of composition.
Walter Koenig: Reflections. To me - a play on a contrast between dark, static & heavy vs. colorful, light & dynamic. I like how the amount and direction of the distortions are different for each window. Joyous and very alive.
Third Place:
Ken Zaret: Among the stars, in a cave, while in a barn. Feels reminiscent of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Lot's of fun.
Second Place:
Margaret Lew: Windows and Mirrors. A very surprising and tricky image that caught me off guard. So many implied realities. Which are the windows and which are the mirrors? Portals withing portals leading to other portals. Like playing Chess trying to follow this. Excellent!
First Place:
Markus Grompe: Starkenburg Nouveau
A subtle blend of the real and the imagined. It's disturbing in a way - there is no safe harbor for resting. The real and the created are perfectly balanced - and it is difficult to avoid moving from the real to the different abstractions of the imagined - and vice a versa. For example, start by at the garden, people and car (left-hand side). Then, the eye is drawn from the real to the black (trees?) backlit in glowing red (middle left and middle right) - the unreal. The vision is then drawn to the red and then white bands spanning the middle - and from there to the pastel colored buildings. It is a journey through structure as well as color.
As a result, the image is liberating. I learned a lot from viewing this - thank you!
