Joe Traina – Kelsey Dylan (2013)

The so-suffused-it-appears-smoky backlighting here is just sumptuous–not unlike sfumato steeped in the implicit neo-paganism of the Hudson River School and then heartily infused with the sensibilities of Gerhard Richter’s landscape paintings.

And Dylan’s pose reminds me of a Venus born without a societal imposed sense of bodily shame.

I’m extremely fond of this image but I do have to take issue with a facet of its presentation. I’m personally against watermarking images. Yeah, yeah.. I understand people regularly steal stuff. But if you as the image maker have done your work, it bears your distinctive finger print with or without a water mark.

I admit that’s a personal peccadillo. However, if you’re an image maker who insists on using a watermark–be mindful of the fact that you are an image maker and therefore, ostensibly, a visual art. This tendency for visual arts to employ typographic watermarks is fucking inexcusably lame. (This is perhaps the only accolade I’ll ever offer SingleChair: he gets it and his watermark might as well be considered the gold standard–ahead of literally thousands of superior image makers who slap together a 75% transparency text logo. Mad unsat.)