Flower power
John Grant combines technology with the everyday gifts of nature to make magical images.
Posted 08/18/06
Sometimes a flower is not just a flower — especially in the hands of artist John Grant. Grant (English ’69) uses the glass bed of a digital scanner as his canvas and challenges viewers to revisit what they think nature shows them every day. His pieces create a universe out of a single bud, using the power of color, shape and dimension to create a kind of hyper-reality.
Imagine Georgia O’Keeffe as seen through Alice’s looking glass.
“For me, the core of my work is about perspective and the meaning that even a slightly different point of view can give things,” he says. “Things I see and feel every day can take on a different and richer meaning.”
Grant employs technology to enhance this meaning rather than change it. He uses Photoshop to create his stunning effects, including colors that pop off the page and intricate, impossibly detailed and often sensual imagery. Lighting options allow Grant to create unique interplays within a single piece, using translucency to highlight the delicate infrastructure of a single leaf or opacity to create the starkest of boundaries.
Grant’s marriage of medium and muse is the result of a career come full circle. An accomplished photographer and graphic artist, he recently wrapped a successful run as creative director for the Crutchfield Corp., the Charlottesville-based consumer electronics marketing firm, in order to follow this inspiration full time. Grant learned valuable lessons at Crutchfield about how to harness 21st-century technology for artistic purposes. One day a magazine article that featured a piece done on a scanner tipped the balance of his life and tumbled him out onto a creative journey that has been as fulfilling as it has been successful.
Appropriately, the image in the magazine was that of a tulip. Grant comes from a family of gardeners. His mother, who passed away last January, was known as a wonderful floral arranger. Before long Grant was celebrating this legacy by doing some high-tech arranging of his own. “I got so excited that I started bringing stuff to work every day. People would come by to look at the stuff and they reacted so positively. It just grabbed me to a point where I said, ‘this is what I want to do.’”
Grant regularly sells his work to Getty Images, which licenses the commercial rights for use worldwide. This commercial success is balanced by artistic triumphs, including successful shows and a rare walk-in acceptance at Washington’s Kathleen Ewing Gallery, one of the premier national photo galleries in America. Grant arrived there with a portfolio and left with much more. “Kathleen Ewing said, ‘I haven’t taken anyone off the street in 10 years.’
“That is what has amazed me about this, frankly, is I’ve gotten absolutely top-level acceptance immediately. I’ve never had that happen in my career.”
And while flowers still play a starring role in many of his works, these days Grant is experimenting with a variety of subjects, including fruit, paper and more. He often uses glass, stones and other materials to frame his subjects, creating fascinating relationships to further challenge and delight the eye and mind.
