Kandinsky's Garden
One primary technique for creating images of alienated beauty is to invert their values (i.e., turn dark elements into light ones, and vice-versa) and move their hues to new points on the color wheel without disrupting the implicitly coherent harmonic relationship of those hues and values to one another. The result, as here, is often one of elements operating in a different dimensional space than before, and with deliciously fresh expressions of color and mood.
This alienated image is an homage to the abstract paintings and pathbreaking colour sensibility of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), whose exquisite work excites aesthetic wonder and other emotions untethered from any literal depiction of concrete, real-world subject matter. "Colour" alone, Kandinsky famously insisted, "is a means of exerting direct influence on the soul." Colour psychologists have since come to a similar conclusion, which underlines both the superior potential and the significant challenge of creating effective photo art in full - erstwhile "vulgar" - colour instead of in prim, traditional black-and-white.
TITLE - "Kandinsky's Garden"
WHERE - Leaf and bark litter found along the shoreline of Lake Murray, La Mesa, California (2015)