“Bainbridge Island, WA USA photographer Mark Lovejoy’s images are not photographs in the conventional sense of what we know a photographic image to be - capturing light, time, and narrative. They are singular in their pursuit of abstraction.
What we have here is a meta picture, a picture of a picture, the texture of the initial image flattened through the process of photography, an abstraction of an abstract image.
They are colorful and vibrant, luscious and sensual and we can’t help but be drawn into an interior world that brings to mind a plethora of images: flowers, barbed wire, threads, water, telephone lines and rain drops on a window pane. This is a Pollock inspired explosion of artistic energy, a primal desire to create for its own sake, to make a formal beauty out of chance and chaos. These pictures are the product of an artist who has spent his life with inks & presses and has taken that work to a creative conclusion, pushing the medium to its limit.
Now in his early sixties Lovejoy has led an interesting life – it reads like a beat novel or a Country Western song – he has travelled much, worked as a printer for nearly 35 years and is now making art that attempts to encapsulate a fascinating journey from Texas to Greece and Iran to India, all the time picking up textures, colors, forms, ideas, thoughts, all the time processing, making, doing. This is his expression of a life as color.”
—paraphrased from Moray Mair at Mutantspace
(http://www.mutantspace.com/mark-lovejoy-photographs-colourful-abstractions/)
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