John Geesink’s Work

Creating images is like cooking a special meal, which requires a cook, kitchen tools, fresh ingredients, and a recipe that explains when to do what. If you have ever written down one of your own recipes for a friend, you know how difficult that can be. It is easy to forget things that seem obvious to you. So when I tried to write down my “image-making recipe” I had to ask myself questions I had not thought about before. It was a good exercise. I hope you will find my description clear and that it will help you better understand and perhaps appreciate my images.

What I bring to my work

I was born in Holland in 1937. In May 1940 the German army invaded our country. During the next five years the occupation and the war surrounded us with violence and uncertainty. Bombing raids, aerial battles and columns of grim looking soldiers marching in our street were scary. My parents told me not to be afraid because, they said, our house stood on the “lucky corner” and nothing could happen to us. I believed them and was not afraid.

When I was very young my grandmother had a ‘gnome forest’ in her garden. There was a small table and four little chairs made of tree branches. At night the gnomes would sit there and have their meals. They always knew when my sister and I were staying with grandmother because they would leave presents for us on their table. We would get up early and sneak out of the house to find our presents. Gnomes were as real to me as my pet rabbit.

In 1958 I left Holland on a boat that took me to New York. I had all my belongings in one sea trunk, a hundred dollars in my pocket and a tuition scholarship from a small college in Massachusetts. I left because my father had told me that he had no faith in my ability to fend for myself and I was determined to prove him wrong.

In the next decade and a half I did so many different things that a career counselor would have thought me mad. I did what interested me both in my studies and in my work and when I got bored I moved on to a new interest. That worked well until I was offered a job in Geneva, Switzerland that turned out to be so full of learning opportunities that it took 25 years before I got bored with it. In 1999 my wife and I returned to America and settled in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where I started a new career as an art photographer.

In the past few years I have learned that creating art draws on everything that makes me who I am – body, mind and soul. All of my experiences, knowledge, skills and emotions play some role in the process of making images. It is impossible to sort them all out, but to my surprise I discovered that two of my childhood experiences have a traceable influence on the kind of images I make today.

The feeling of being safe in the middle of a violent world has stayed with me. Many of my images show dark skies, contorted tree roots and decaying plants. To me these scenes are not morbid or threatening. Rather they remind me of the fact that I can watch their awesome beauty from the safety of my “lucky corner.” It is like listening to the sounds of a fierce rainstorm from the comfort of your favorite chair in front of a warm fire in the fireplace.

There came a time when my grandmother told me that it was she who had placed the presents on the little table in the forest and that gnomes didn’t really exist. I refused to believe her then and I still think she was wrong. There are times when I can sense the mystery that nature hides behind its beauty. When I walk on the beach or through the forest I feel as if nature has just asked me a question and is waiting for my response. I sense an invitation to a dialogue and I respond the best way I know how - with my images.

Not long ago I showed a new image to Valerie, the owner of the gallery that sells my work in Newburyport. She looked at it and then turned to me and said: “Now that is a John Geesink image.” Up to that moment I had not given “style” much thought, but her comment started me thinking.

My style is not something that I consciously apply to my work. To say anything about it I have to look back at my work and see if my images share certain characteristics. Below is what I have found so far.

I use subdued, earthy colors and use them sparingly.

· I love the interplay between revealing and hiding and often use shades of darkness to achieve this effect.

· I like my images to be so lifelike that the viewer can, as it were, run a finger over the image and “feel” the textures – the roughness of tree bark, the softness of moss.

· “Rough painting” is a term used to describe a 17^th century Dutch style of painting. When viewed from up close paintings painted in the rough manner seem to consist of nothing but daubs, blotches and smears of paint. From a distance, however, such paintings show extraordinary detail and lifelikeness. I use a similar “rough manner” in creating many of my images. I employ noise, chromatic aberration, sharpening haloes, and other digital “imperfections” if they help me achieve a more expressive and lifelike image. Like the rough paintings they best be viewed from a distance.

· I like images that whisper, suggest and above all invite reflection.

The tools & techniques I use

I use two digital single lens reflex cameras, a Nikon D200 and a Nikon D300 and three lenses, a Nikon 18-36mm-e, a 27-300mm-e and a 120-600mm-e. I carry a small pocket camera, the Panasonic LX3 that has a 24-60mm lens, as my sketchpad. For image editing I use Adobe Photoshop with various plug-in programs. To keep track of all my images I use IMatch and for printing I use Qimage software. I have an Epson Stylus Pro 3800 printer that uses pigment inks and takes paper up to 17” wide. When a client wants a larger print I print it on a friend’s Epson printer that holds 24” wide paper on a roll. I use luster paper for all my prints.

Where I find my subjects

I often have no preconceived idea of what subject I want to capture. I make a decision to go to the beach, marsh or forest and then I walk and observe until something strikes me. I am attracted by the beauty of imperfect things, by evidence of the forces of nature and by subjects that seem to point beyond themselves.

Once in a while there is a day when I see nothing that inspires me. When that happens I pull a little card out of my camera bag on which a friend who teaches art has written a number of shooting assignments. That usually starts my creative engine again.

Sometimes I bring home sea debris from the beach – crabs, shells, driftwood, etc. I use this material to compose still lifes on top of a flatbed scanner. I made a series of images in this way and several of these have made it into my portfolio (see under 2004, 2005 and 2009 – they are the ones with black backgrounds).

I do almost all of my photographing in an area no farther than a 20-minute drive from my home in Newburyport. To the east lies the Atlantic Ocean and Plum Island with its miles of unspoiled sandy beaches. To the south lies the Great Marsh with its salt-water marshlands that stretch for miles parallel to the coastline. To the west lies Maudslay State Park with its 496 acres of beautiful woodlands and fields that once formed a private estate. To the north flows the Merrimack River, a wide tidal river that once brought clipper ships to the harbor of Newburyport and today provides a habitat for bald eagles that once again breed along the river.

I visit these places over and over again. The better I know a place, the more subjects I see. Each of the areas changes with the seasons, the weather, the tide and the time of day. Add to all of these external changes the internal changes in my moods, thoughts and feelings and it becomes clear that there is simply no chance that I will run out of subjects to photograph.

When I go on vacation I shoot lots of pictures to remind me of what I saw. These are meant as snap shots not art images. Only once in a great while does a vacation picture become a portfolio image. I wish I could make that happen more often. Because I love Paris I put some of my Paris pictures on the website. These pictures are vacation shots to be enjoyed by fellow Paris lovers.

Creating the image

The first step of creating an image is to take a photograph. I use all the camera skills I have learned while using film cameras during the last 47 years. Taking a good photograph still requires a whole series of creative decisions before tripping the shutter. When I come home from a shoot I load the image onto my computer and all of a sudden I have a whole new set of creative choices available to me. This second set of choices gives me a creative freedom that I could only dream about in the past. No wonder this is the part of my work that I enjoy most. Here, like a painter in front of an empty canvas, I am challenged by a seemingly endless number of creative possibilities. True, the digital photograph I start with is not an empty canvas, but neither is it an almost completed image. For me the photograph serves as an underpainting or a sketch. It is the starting point of a workflow that ends with the final image. Along the way I will touch the 10 million pixels that make up my “underpainting’. I rearrange them and change their colors and luminosity and I often do this several times before I am satisfied with the final printed image.

Not all of my photographs require the same amount of creative work. Once or twice a year I take a photograph that requires only minor editing before becoming part of my portfolio, but most of my photographs require extensive editing, which may take one or more days to complete. If I know exactly what I want the final image to look like the work goes faster. Often, however, the final image emerges during the editing. One of my favorite images called “Dreaming of May” started as a snapshot. I almost deleted it but then, just for fun, I started to play with the image. After an hour or so I suddenly saw a fascinating image emerge. It took another two days before I had transformed the snapshot into one of my most favorite images.

There are no standards for how much a photograph can be edited and still be considered a photograph. I came to digital imaging as a photographer, not as a painter. I don’t want my images to look as if they were painted. But neither do I want them to look like a print made from a negative in a darkroom. The challenge for me is to explore what digital photography can contribute as a unique art form.

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I make images because I love the work. I feel satisfied when I can add a new image to my portfolio. But I feel most satisfied when an image strikes a responsive chord with a viewer.