Brighter Than Life: The Photography Portfolio of Dan McGarrah
Dan McGarrah is a photographic artist who uses the medium of photography and combines it with digital techniques and wild, brighter-than-life colour schemes to create artworks that would be at home in a gallery of abstract paintings.
I really enjoy Dan’s FROM ABOVE series, in which the artist photographs the canopies of trees. It appears that the artist, ironically, takes the photos from below, allowing for a few of the trees that emulates the appearance of a topographical map, or paint splashed down on a flat canvas. Dan manipulates the colours of these photographs to create palettes that are both energetic and totally outside the realm of what one might associate with nature and plant life.
Elsewhere in his portfolio, in his NIGHTS IN A CITY: San Francisco series, Dan uses black and white photography techniques to capture the texture and architectural arrangement of urban spaces. Some of the photos in this series remind me Scott Ivey’s paintings of cities, in their focus on space often devoid of human presence.
