Fall Leaves

I recently talked to a retired chemist who took an interest in a book I was buying. He said that in chemistry they used something called perturbation theory, where you thump a thing to see what it does when it jiggles and bounces back to its natural state.

I suppose physicists do a similar thing when they smash atoms together to see how the particles break apart. That could be called destruction theory.

This happens in art as well. In destroying an image, you learn something about the nature of its components. Gerhard Richter scraped paintings 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" 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.