Chris Vest is based in Dolores, Colorado, United States. He’s much too critical of himself and work. He says he has a history of taking mediocre photos of birds. His impatience and crummy lens, he has collected bird images from Alaska to Israel that are breathtakingly out-of-focus and dull. But he does have computer Photoshop skills, so his choice was either to cut his throat in self-loathing and photo envy, or breathe new life into the bad photos with considerable touch-up merging and “painting”,; and so voila: part photography, part painting. Vest has been an illustrator and photographer for 30 years; but it’s unfortunate that it’s almost all been for employers that view art purely as commerce, so he felt it was high time that he demonstrated to himself (and to the world) the nature of his own personal vision. The American Bird Conservancy got attracted to his new works, and they commissioned him to produce bird illustrations for an upcoming book.
Vest calls himself a “Neo Photo-Secessionist.” This term he borrows from the tradition of Alfred Stieglitz and his group. The artist particularly identifies with the beautiful tonality and etched surfaces of Gertrude Kasebier, Edward J. Steichen, and Heinrich Kuehn. These artists at the turn of the 19th century were trying to bridge photography and fine art to give photography the kind of appearance that traditional painting had. The artists therefore manipulated their black-and-white images to make them look more like pictures. All of Vest’s images are currently offered as professionally printed giclee prints.
