Figures and Landscape

Figures in the Landscape

PictureI have long worked with the relationship of the human figure to the landscape. It is a most difficult problem visually. Too much figure and the meaning switches to being a portrait. Too little figure and the human element is difficult to access, if not impossible. There is the added problem of why a nude figure? That's easy to answer in that the nude allows the viewer to related to the human element and not to an historical time”--that is an additional confusion for interpretation. Why a female figure? She represents all of humanness. All humans start out as female and so sh is the basic human. As a heterosexual male I find in the female form the completion of what is missing in me. She is my muse, my other half. I have had some of the most wonderful models and found the synergy of working with deep love and respect to be a consummation of what all of creations is meant to be. Male nudes are aggressive (we interpret them that way). There is a naturalness about the female nude that we understand intuitively and relate it to the earth. But beyond this the fact that the figure is unclothed serves as a sign that human beings are by their very nature part of the natural world. Wynn Bullock explains:

I have long worked with the relationship of the human figure to the landscape. It is a most difficult problem visually. Too much figure and the meaning switches to being a portrait. Too little figure and the human element is difficult to access, if not impossible. There is the added problem of why a nude figure? That's easy to answer in that the nude allows the viewer to related to the human element and not to an historical time”—that is an additional confusion for interpretation. Manuel Alvarez Bravo said: "Nudes. They say it all. Life and death. In “The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form,” Kenneth Clark distinguishes “nude” from “naked,” the latter implying an unwanted lack of clothing: “The word ‘nude,’ on the other hand,” he writes, “carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed.”

Why a female figure? She represents all of humanness. All humans start out as female and so she is the basic human. As a heterosexual male I find in the female form the completion of what is missing in me. She is my muse, my other half. I have had some of the most wonderful models and found the synergy of working with deep love and respect to be a consummation of what all of creations is meant to be. Male nudes are aggressive (we interpret them that way). There is a naturalness about the female nude that we understand intuitively and relate it to the earth. But beyond this the fact that the figure is unclothed serves as a sign that human beings are by their very nature part of the natural world. Wynn Bullock explains: " By using the nude, I stopped thinking in terms of objects, I was seeing things, instead, as dynamic events, unique in their own beings yet also related and existing yet as related and existing within a universal context of energy and change."*
These images were first created on film. Black & white, color negatives, color transparencies.

*Quoted from Wynn Bullock Photographing the Nude, II. By Barbara Bullock-Wilson.
Also, see, Brett Abbott Wynn Bullock Revelations.