LOOK & LISTEN: Art about photography

MEDIA: Painting, drawing, photography, video

BEST KNOWN FOR: Making drawings and paintings about photography. Willome said his art explores his ideas about photographic imagery and our experience with it.

“I get kind of philosophical about it,” Willome said. “I'm kind of a nerd about it.”

Part of his series “Evangelical Body-Sense” involves painting and drawings that deal with photography. For that series, Willome first took a board and carved into the face of it, like you would with a woodcut. He rubbed charcoal into the carved area. He then dropped the board on paper, causing an explosive-like charcoal residue to stain the paper. Like a photograph, Willome said his charcoal measured a particular moment in time.

“It parallels the instance of making a photograph with the instance of an explosion,” Willome said.

Photography, like other art forms, can be conceptual or used to express ideas.

“The language of photography is specialized,” Willome said. “The time issue is where I cross over a lot.”

Through its history, photography also developed the formal language of other arts, such as use of line, color and shadows.

“You can make a strong argument that photography emerged from painting,” Willome said. Their intermingled history is why Willome likes to mix the two.