Part VI: Drawing - Todd R Forsgren

Evening Sky with Straight Rainbows, 2018.

Rainbow Vulture Vortex, 2018.

Making Mountains, 2018.

In 2007, I drove down this road in Coastal Texas and it was the flattest landscape I’d ever seen. So, when chance brought me back to this road again in 2018, I took a photo, and decided to make mountains on the horizon of this impossibly flat landscape.

Drawing Towards Significant Change

These images are my photographic sketches. I think of many of these works are failures. But important failures. Works that I needed to get somewhere else or are my best attempt thus far at getting somewhere that I want to go, and so I cherish them.

Failure is a rarely celebrated part of progress and innovation in the arts and the sciences (as well as everything in between). With an artistic practice where each image I make is often radically different than the previous work, failure is especially inevitable and also especially generative. So here I am, celebrating my failures and my jokes, and putting them up here for you to puzzle over, laugh at or reflect on.

I certainly think of my failed images more often than I think of the successes. They’re like itches that I can’t help scratching: what is it that I liked about this idea and where did I go wrong? Is the problem technical or conceptual? Or just that I didn’t do enough, and I somehow feel guilty about that? So I will keep plugging away at the idea until I’m satisfied.

In the sciences, where things are a bit more regimented than here in the arts, they have a whole process to deal with their moments of inspiration. Question. Research. Hypothesis. Experimentation. Analysis. Publish. However, when the hypothesis doesn’t work, we rarely hear about it. Such failures just don’t get published in the limited space of scientific journals.

I often think about all the redundant Master’s theses have been completed because of this limited room to value and share these failures. Knowing why and how we fail is central to innovation, and so this is why I’ve put these up for anyone to see. Maybe you’ve failed in the same way I’ve failed. Or maybe you can succeed where I’ve failed. I hope so.

On a Flat Wet World, 2015.

Photographs are flat. The world isn’t. It’s one of the biggest differences between the world and the image world. But often, I feel like I live in the image world, and what I observe in the real world just reminds of what I’ve experienced in the image world. So what would be different if we lived on a flat planet? Would rainbows be straight instead of curved? There would probably be edges. I love edges. My flat world looks something like this picture.

Reversed Landscape V1.0: Waterfall Meets Tree in the Jungle, 2017.

This is a photograph of a tree and a waterfall coming together in a lush green ravine. But since the landscape is upside-down, backwards, and a negative, you might not recognize it right away.

Reversed Landscape V2.0: A View of the White Picket Fence from the Other Side, 2018.

Barrier of Moiré and Forest Edge, walnut frame and 12"x15" archival inkjet prints on rice paper, 2015.

This is a screen made of screens. Where the digital world and the natural world collide. Permeable but impenetrable. I think.

Drawing a Spider Web with Apple's "Measure" App, 2018.

Under Construction, 2013.

Hazy Hills, © Todd R. Forsgren, 2008-2011.

I own this landscape. That’s why my name is floating in the sky. But if you send me $1.00 via PayPal or Venmo or personal check, I'll send you a version of this image without my name on it. For your own use at 4000x5000 pixels. That’s 20 megapixels for $1.00, a pretty good deal! You can do anything you want with it, except sell it to someone else. Still, if someone else wants to buy it, let me know. We can work something out, I’m sure.

Be Complex V3.0, 2009.

Years ago, Tom walked into my studio and said, “I want to hang that piece above my toilet, so I can look at it every time I take a piss.” I’d never met him before, but I knew he made paintings of beautiful naked people bathing in the sublime landscape. I think his comment to me was supposed to be an insult, but I took it as a compliment.

Years ago, William showed up at my apartment asking for money. He was angry and on coke. He had a taken out a loan from the wrong sort. But I couldn’t help. He left, creating a scene, and the last I saw of him was him pissing into the swimming pool, yelling at the top of his lungs. Then the flash of red and blue lights.

Plastic Rainbow in a Horizontal World, 2015.

I've always wanted to see what a rainbow looked like from the side, but whenever I see one it’s always from straight on: with the bow arching in front of me, broad across the landscape. So, I decided to try to make it happen in my studio. One morning, with a few transparent strips of plastic and a light rain and soft wind blowing through the open window, I finally saw this vision. It was everything I’d hope for.

Global Roasting, 2013.

Imaging living on a planet with five suns… Consider the path that that plant might follow: It’d be a wonky, bumpy, and irregular orbit, traveling around the center of the system’s mass. Every once-in-a-while, the suns might line up, and you could see them all rise or set in unison. Or three rising while two sets. Simultaneous sunrise and sunset. Imagine the beauty of that! The planet might be considerably hotter than ours, but maybe not. Certainly the seasons would be complicated. But if you lived on that planet, you'd adapt. It would become utterly ordinary. There'd be overpasses and parking lots, and there’d even be street lights, just in case none of the suns were up in the sky.

Alpha and Omega, 2004-2010.

I’ll admit it: I’ve taken A LOT of photographs of sunrises and sunset. I just can’t resist photographic candy like that. It’s delicious. For a long time, I felt guilty about this. Like I used to feel about other things after twelve years of Catholic school. But this image is an embrace of that opulence: A photographic blending of hundreds of pictures I’ve taken of sunsets and sunrises, presented simultaneously.

The Wanderer Beneath his own Smog, 2018.

This is the most stupid image I’ve ever made. But it seems appropriate for this era.

Moment of Oops, 2012.

Some days I don’t know whether I’m making art or making memes. This was one of those days. I certainly feel satisfied, so I’m not so sure it matters if it’s art or a meme. Especially because animal memes are my favorite species of meme.

Faux Northern Lights, 2013.

I've only seen the Northern Lights twice; both times they were faint and fleeting. The photos I've seen are so much more vibrant. Which made me jealous. But in the darkroom, I figured out a way to fake it.

The Spins, 2017.

One day I was walking through the forest when I turned my head upwards to look at a bird, and the whole world started spinning. Uncontrollable vertigo, and soon I was clutching the earth and vomiting. Miles from anywhere, I laid against the earth, unsure if the spinning would ever stop. But two minutes later, it had, I stood up and I walked out of the forest.

Clean End Derived from the Beginning, 2017.

Folks keep pronouncing stuff dead that seems very much alive to me. God. Painting. Photography. Is photography over? Every so often people ride that pony around and it’s interesting and maybe even useful to think about. But it’s a dead end. And this is a dead end too. Well, at least it’s the last image in this sprawling series of mine… This last photograph is a cleaned-up version of the first photograph by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. It’s my futile attempt to tie a bow around the medium’s complicated history. Here, all that remains of the view from his studio is a gradient of sky and the lozenge shaped form of the roof of the building across the street. I shape I’m obsessed with.