Our artist focus: Bill Dewey is now available as a video.  Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/PwUMjlCPThE

Below you can read our original feature.

artist focus:
Bill Dewey

Bill Dewey uses distance, perspective, and scale to capture extraordinary landscapes and challenge our beliefs about photography and realism.

Dewey reveals hidden textures and forms in his aerial photographs. Flying low above the ocean in late afternoon, he exposes a hammered glass surface in Channel Reflections. Cloud reflections are blurred, appearing like lights glowing from a world below.

His Cessna enables him to capture remarkable views and an intimate relationship with grandeur. Storm clouds simulate an armada of airships flying through mountain peaks in Lenticulars over Camino Cielo.

Dewey’s Wave series required him to wade into the ocean and lean down to capture wavelets along the Santa Barbara coast. Flash-frozen ripples then become colossal green glaciers. The closer he gets to his subject the more monumental the waves appear.

Several years ago, viewing Del Mar — his childhood beach — via a webcam, Bill photographed his computer monitor and created a series of  painterly snapshots of San Diego from two hundred miles away. Pixelated overlapping images from the webcam become portals to his past and give the photographs a contemporary scrim of nostalgia.

In the Torn Pieces series, Dewey deconstructs time and distance by photographing his own work. Bill photographed scraps from archives he planned to discard scattered over his studio floor. The photographs were virtual collages representing thousands of miles and decades of work — randomly thrown down, edges both torn and cut. Photos of the collages themselves appear in subsequent photos of the collages.

A breeze flips over one of the pieces in Second Chances, 6-7-20, Wind, final evidence of the creator’s fabrication.

—Cynthia Stahl