In destroying an image, you learn something about the nature of its components. The painter Gerhard Richter scraped his canvas until the original image no longer was recognizable, but was replaced by streaks of color down the canvas, which showed how the pigments that once formed a coherent image now interacted in a more chaotic state.
I’ve been working on a series called “Fall Leaves” in which I’ve taken images of leaves and destroyed their natural color values. In doing so, the resulting shapes and contexts have revealed something hidden about the leaf that I hadn’t seen when creating the image.
