08/05/2026
“Color Study in Jail” What was I thinking?
Last week, I stayed at home one day when I had planned to go on an outing with my photo friends. Since I am having hip pain and find it hard to walk, I stayed at home. The others ventured to the Renwick Bird Sanctuary in Illinois and to the Joliet Jail.
It was my intention to continue with an AI software course… but I got distracted.
One of the projects that I tackled last week was selecting and providing one image from every day of an abstract photo workshop in April that I had taken in Paris, France. I returned to the image folder where I had one of the images of a colorful sculpture in La Defense neighborhood in Paris.. I started to combine other images I had made from the sculpture. They showed colorful lines of various thicknesses And I was off….
I montaged one photo with another and then another. I erased the parts that I didn’t like on one image (via masking) in order to keep what I did like on the photo underneath. I duplicated the file and merged the two photos together into one layer and distorted it. Then I combined the distortion with the version I had created before. I added shadows to give a 3 D effect, as if one layer was behind the other. Finally, I cropped the image and added a stroke around it for a finishing touch.
I call the resulting image, “Color Study in Jail.” I couldn’t physically be at the prison today, but I guess my subconcious mind took me there, or maybe it thought my confinement to the house was like being in prison.
At any rate, working with bright colors always seems to cheer me up. During Covid, much of my work was very colorful.
So, what do you think of this process and the result? What does this image symbolize for you?
