Anne McDonald

 Anne Arden McDonald - Cluster (Framed Abstract Camera-less Still Life Photograph in Black and White) For Sale at 1stDibs

Chemical painting have been extremely interesting to me as someone who has a love for both science and art. I find the unnpredictable-ness of the chemicals and photo paper is beautiful. It forces you to let go of a part of you seeking perfection and trying to control the outcome. While the pieces may not always have be best outcome, the happy accidents that happen sometimes make it worth it.

Anne McDonald's work is a perfect example of how interesting an image can turn out with no way of predicting it. The small details poke through creating many places for the viewer to see observe detail as well as very interesting and smooth transitions between colors and shades on the paper. The more you look at these one of. kind pieces, the more striking aspects there are to be seen. I really do wonder what some of the resists she uses are, and if this is black and white photo paper or colored photo paper. 

A common theme among Anne McDonald's work is circles, and I really enjoy this because I find circles very fascinating. I like to think of a lot of these as symbols for the common patterns we see all over nature, from the atom to the universe. The image above is my favorite of McDonald's. Spirals are also very interesting to me, and in the one above, the lines appear to look like octopus tentacles. I also love the whisky lines that are coming off, almost appearing as smoke or maybe the octopus squirted ink into the water. Whatever the story may be, there is no doubt that Anne McDonald uses the process of chemigrams in a beautiful and intricate way to create visually stunning and geometrically pleasing images.


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