Patti Bartelstein

Personal and spiritual awakening has accompanied the pursuit of my art. And my love for the natural world, and its landscapes, has been a tremendous source of inspiration. Each piece of work in Fluid Awakenings… visually portrays my spiritual journey of honing my instincts, my intuition and my timing to help me achieve presence. Presence has taught me of impermanence: our lives are nothing but fluid and fleeting. Remarkable comfort can be found through unconditional acceptance of whatever and whoever may come our way. And through this enlightened acceptance comes an awakening.

Each original image in Fluid Awakenings…. came through the creation of personally hand-crafted filters, and my manipulation of these filters. Filters were stacked and removed. Exposure times were increased and decreased. And now, with camera in hand, I used my tools of instinct, intuition and timing again, and my enlightenment was visually portrayed in the ethereal quality I desired.

The combination of film, filters, shifts of focus, exposure, movement, position of the camera, and scale results in a completely unique, unre-touched, un-enhanced image that merges abstraction and realism…all in my hopes of conveying enlightenment.

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