At art school in the early 90s, Mark Soltero considered himself to be a painter. He thought of printmaking and photography as being “really flat” and could not have imagined how much he would be drawn to these mediums in his future work.

Originally from San Fransisco, Soltero now lives in Governor’s Bay, near Christchurch, and works across all three of these fields. His work, which draws on the nature of cinema and also personal experience, incorporates a unique stencilling process in which almost all parts of the stencils, including the reverse sides and the stencils themselves, are used.

“I think of all three fields as extensions of drawing. For me, they’re all manifestations of visual thinking; ways of making images,” Soltero explains.

“A lot of my work starts off with an image that begins in my mind or is triggered by some fragment of an image I’ve seen. I might take a drawing from a sketch book and put it together with a digital image so I can see what the two suggest together, or I might begin with a digital drawing and print it out before beginning to cut into it. Considering the relationship I had with printmaking and photography, it’s pretty funny that my work has come to focus so much on filmic and commercial image making processes.”

In a recent series, titled ‘History is Cinematic’, Soltero focused on the interiors of cinemas as “containers of images, history and memory”. The completed body of work produced large-scale images, some up to six metres wide, and provided a starting point for his current series, ‘Fragments of Memory’.

In this body of work, paintings and monoprints are created on a variety of substrates including wool blankets, which are chosen for their histories of care and protection and the concept of family. The works, which incorporate actual fragments of the previous series, reflect a turbulent period of Soltero’s life arising from the disintegration of his family and other tumultuous events in the late 1970s.

“In the 24-month period that began with the summer of 1977, my parents began an eight year divorce, we moved several times, the mayor and now-famous city counsellor Harvey Milk were assassinated, and the Jonestown Massacre took place. All of these events were in very close view, and, for me, this period is when image became synonymous with projection. Coincidentally, at the beginning of that summer, I had just become aware that I wanted to be an artist, even although I had no idea what that meant.”

Counterbalancing the seemingly endless options provided from working across three artistic fields, Soltero limits himself to a colour palette that is almost exclusively black and white.

“Both black and white have a long and rich history across many cultures and in Western Art in general,” says Soltero.

A common practice throughout the history of art across all mediums, a restricted colour palette provides artists with the opportunity to reduce visual noise and focus on the development of particular ideas and procedures. 

“You can look back through the history of a given artists’ work and see periods where artists have reduced what they were doing before springing into a new body of work. The Cubists initially limited their colour palette. Pollock limited his colour palette at the beginning of his drip series. Later, after he’d reached a zenith, he again went back to black and white to try and work out where he was going next. You can look at more contemporary examples and see the same thing."

The work of Kara Walker, who initially became known for large black paper silhouettes installed on the walls of galleries and museums, is a major inspiration for Soltero.

“She’s such a power-house of talent. I love the fact that there’s this power in the scale of what she’s doing while at the same time there’s a delicateness and fragility in the medium.”

Alongside a restricted palette, the process of stencilling is in itself restrictive but also highly rewarding.

“The reveal, when you lift a stencil after having painted over it, is probably the moment of greatest joy - or total frustration - in my process.”

“The individual random shapes that make up a given stencil make me think of molecules or particles in space. They’re very simple and mundane but together they form a relationship and make an image. There’s a curiosity. I have to find different relationships between them by taking those small cut outs and rearranging them.”

Stencilling also brings about opportunities for chance and accident. 

“When I lay the stencils out for a painting. I can cut as accurately as a machine and I can map out the placement of each section but ultimately they migrate and do their own thing.”

“The concept of control is somewhat contradictory just like black and white appear to provide clarity and a kind of fixed assurance but also together they make grey, which is like the perfect analogy to imprecision.”

Soltero intends to continue working at a large scale and is interested in exploring what can be achieved with instillations.

“I think about paintings that hang in the space rather than on the wall. I’m interested in what experiences might occur between the image in the painting and the physicality of the image as a material object located in space. In this way there might be an interaction between the visual referents to space and time in the image, and the referents manifested by physical experience of the material in its location.”

“In my work I think about the way we see objects and events in our immediate surroundings, and how we think about these objects and events. For example we might reflect on where we just were an hour ago, and we’re able to project ourselves mentally to another space and time. We can see this space and time and think of the sounds and visual experiences we had there and then while we’re here and now. Our minds are always processing in this manner. I try to deal with an experience of space that takes into account this wide range of things we probably all think about but perhaps don’t often have the opportunity to reflect on.”

You can see more of Solteros work on his website, marksoltero.com.

Written by
George Arthur-Amohau

Images courtesy of
Mark Soltero

The Distance Between You and Me, a photographic series by Inge Flinte, aims to explore the lonely spaces in our lives: capturing what remains in the moments without others; and exhibiting the intimate, private spaces that exist after life has occurred.

The project, which has been in the pipeline for a number of years, began when Flinte’s mother recounted the flashbacks experienced by a dying friend.

“I worked on the series for about a year before putting it aside,” Flinte explains. “Mainly this was because the emotional weight of the work felt too difficult to deal with at the time. I revisited it when my brother was diagnosed with lymphoma and the distance that I had felt compelled to create became a metaphor for the distance I felt between myself and my brother; the distance between life and death.”

Flinte has explored distance in her photography before. An earlier body of work, titled Uchi, the Japanese word for home, connects with both her mother’s heritage, and, again, the residue of life that is left in a space once its human inhabitants disappear. A portrait of goodness and imperfections, Uchi captures the feelings, colours, seasons, light, and food of home.

Drawn to beauty and curiosities that are often overlooked or ignored, Flinte’s work records the subtleties of everyday life.

​“I like to use photography as a form of note-taking; that is recording images to hold onto things that I feel are slipping away. They become little reminders of my everyday and reflections of what I see.”

Two years ago, Graeme Campbell downloaded Instagram and was inspired to launch into his own photography. After just nine months, he has demonstrated a natural flair behind the camera and gathered over four-thousand Instagram followers. All this, and he’s just 14.

Campbell doesn’t miss an opportunity to get out and take photographs and picks up most of his skills by getting outside and giving it a go. “I have learnt photography through trial and error and a lot of YouTube videos”.

Proof that putting yourself out there and having a go is sometimes the best way to learn, Campbell isn’t deterred by not yet being able to take photography at school. “My school doesn’t offer photography as a course in years 9, 10 or 11, but I will definitely take it in years 12 and 13.”

When tuition is needed, the benefits of a collective pool of online knowledge shared by many other, predominantly young, photographers becomes clear. Not only are so many young artists taking fantastic photographs, they’re also not afraid to share what they learn with others.

19-year-old, LA-based photographer, Michael Steric, who boasts over 178 thousand Instagram followers and shares his work and methods across Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, is another key source of inspiration and knowledge for Campbell.

Not only following young photographers overseas, Campbell, who is particularly interested in astro-photography, is inspired by the work of Queenstown photographer, Jordan McInally.

Not unlike many artists starting out, Campbell sites his main challenge as a photographer as getting his work seen. But, spurred on by recent successes including being featured on Canon New Zealand’s official Instagram account, and selling his first canvas print, his plan is simple: keep trying and keep putting out good work and the followers will come.

You can join Campbell’s growing number of Instagram followers at instagram.com/graeme.c.photography.

From the Scottish Highlands to the gently rolling hills of Botswana and the Kalahari Desert, Emma Willetts has visited a diverse array of wildernesses. Her time travelling spanned 10 years, and accorded visits to over 60 countries whilst on the crew of a private super-yacht.

Willetts finds the ocean to be both inspiring and incredibly diverse, and spending many years travelling mainly by sea presented endless opportunities to capture its beauty.

Long journeys between destinations could sometimes last up to two or three weeks. “We had a lot of down time on those long passages, so a lot of time to spend out on deck meditating, observing, just watching”. It was in this watching that Willetts learned the best moments to photograph her vast subject. “You get to know the times of day where the sky is a certain colour, and typically the ocean becomes a little more still at the end of the day or very early morning".

There would, though, be stopovers on these long trips, and the crew would have time to explore for a day or two in each country. “We had a great captain who wanted us to see/experience as much as we could. As did the owner of the yacht.”

When on land, Willetts’ photography focuses on capturing the unique nature of the location, and the personality of its inhabitants. Already fond of photographing horses and cows, Botswana presented the opportunity to extend this animal-trend to zebras; a subject she found fascinating. “They’re not hard to capture, but I always try and photograph subjects slightly differently to the norm.”

A generous amount of negative space applied to awe-inspiring, exotic locations imbues a luxurious feel to her work, which Willetts has now begun selling online.

Willetts talks about the importance of developing her own style. “There are so many incredible photographers out there, and it's hard not to be too influenced by them.” For her, social media presents both inspiration and challenges. “It's really, really important to stay true to yourself. Keep producing work you love, and try not to get too caught up in what other people think.”

Being overseas presented Willetts with opportunities to take part in workshops and retreats with other photographers, including Dan O'Day and Samm Blake’s ‘Art and the Heart’ workshop in New York.

Like many contemporary, self-taught photographers, the internet is also a valuable source of learning. “I love Sue Bryce’s work and, although I’ve never met her, I’ve done a lot of her workshops online”. Willetts recommends Creative Live: “It’s an amazing platform for creatives.”

Willetts’ work is available from her recently launched website, emmawillettsprints.com. The site brings together a carefully curated collection of images from both New Zealand and her travels. “Each piece has been chosen to invoke feelings of vibrancy, tranquility, warmth, peace, and of course, wanderlust.”