Portland Center Stage at the Armory Coriolanus Portland Oregon

Still Crazy After All These Months

Photographer K.B. Dixon's Still-Life in a Time of Sequestration, Part 3: An uncommon world of common shapes.

August 17, 2020

K.B. Dixon

Culture, Photography

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY K.B. DIXON

It has been months now since my last foray into still-life, and I am still here sequestered, hiding as best I can from the prowling plague known as Covid-19. The people I am sequestered with are still not interested in being photographed, and the places I am sequestered in still remain private rather than public—so, as a photographer trying to stay photographically fit, I am obliged to turn my attention yet again to the charm of “things.”

In previous installments I focused my attention on household goods, on objects near and sometimes dear (the utilitarian, the talismanic, and the decorative): here I am taking a look at something more “abstract”—the basic building blocks of visual art, the meditative mystery of form.

My hope has been to produce a moment of order and quiet at a time of disorder and noise, and to offer a sort of half-assed homage to art’s essential elements and to the great Italian painter, Giorgio Morandi, one of the still-life genre’s most gifted obsessives.

BALL, CYLINDER, CUBE, 2020

BALL, CYLINDER, PYRAMID, CUBE, 2020

CYLINDER, PYRAMID, CUBE, 2020

Sponsor

Portland Columbia Symphony Adelante Voices of Tomorrow Beaverton and Gresham Oregon

CYLINDER, PYRAMID, CUBE (ALIGNED), 2020

BALL, CYLINDER (BACK), CUBE, 2020

BALL, CUBE, 2020

BALL, CYLINDER (FRONT), CUBE, 2020

BALL, CYLINDER, CUBE (ALIGNED), 2020

PYRAMID, CYLINDER, CUBE, 2020

Sponsor

Portland Playhouse Passing Strange Portland Oregon

Photographer and writer K.B. Dixon is a frequent contributor to ArtsWatch. His earlier piece in this series are:

Among several other projects for ArtsWatch, Dixon’s series of portraits of Oregon writers and visual artists is ongoing, including his most recent:

The Artists Series 4: Visual Artists.

K.B. Dixon

K.B. Dixon’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and journals. His most recent collection of stories, Artifacts: Irregular Stories (Small, Medium, and Large), was published in Summer 2022. The recipient of an OAC Individual Artist Fellowship Award, he is the winner of both the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Eric Hoffer Book Award. He is the author of seven novels: The Sum of His Syndromes, Andrew (A to Z), A Painter’s Life, The Ingram Interview, The Photo Album, Novel Ideas, and Notes as well as the essay collection Too True, Essays on Photography, and the short story collection, My Desk and I. Examples of his photographic work may be found in private collections, juried exhibitions, online galleries, and at K.B. Dixon Images.