Book Spotlight – Encounters

Jun 19

Posted by authorcamilson

ENCOUNTERS by Patrick Stull

Title: ENCOUNTERS

Author: Patrick Stull

Publisher: Independent

Pages: 250

Genre: Fine Art Photography Book

With photography at its base, Stull offers a nuanced explication of
his encounters to allow the viewer an opportunity to form a relationship
with his art. While looking within ourselves, exploring our own
feelings, he hopes that he will inspire greater humaneness in response
to his art.ENCOUNTERS is the second in a series of six large-format books in
which artist, photographer and author, Patrick Stull explores a wide
range of experiences. Using light and the physical body, the written
word and his artistry he creates imagery that examines aspects of the
lives of women.

Compiled over the last 18 years, the images in ENCOUNTERS, Stull
says, are meant to “inspire and challenge the observer while always
empowering the subject.”

Stull brings a powerful sense of the surreal and the spiritual to his
work as he plots a course along the many paths of the human experience.
His imagery runs from the ghostly and ephemeral to the flowing and
fiery.

As much as he concentrates on the human form, Stull never forgets to
focus on the humanity of his subjects. His choice of the coffee-table
style book format draws the viewer into an experience both intimate and
universal.

Stull’s first book in his series, titled EVOLVE, was published in
2006. A third book, titled HIDDEN DIMENSIONS, is completed and awaiting
publication. Future titles in the series include DHARMA, BEING
DIFFERENT, and YOGA, A HEALING MOMENT.

Stull hopes that his readers come away from the book with “a love for
art and a respect for the female who gives us life and challenges us to
be better human beings.

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Encounters
is a collection of imagery created and compiled over the last 15 years to
inspire and challenge the observer while always empowering the subject. The
imagery is coupled with text, odes and perspectives about the human experience
and existence itself. The imagery is mostly an explication, an intimate view of
the lives of women and our relationship to them – on an individual and cultural
level. However, there are images of men included in this work. A portion of the
portfolio presents something more than a photographic image. Here the imagery
is developed into contemplative art pieces of the surreal genre, where the
viewer is transported into the depths of their own psyche challenging them to
see something new.

American
artist Patrick Stull has spent the last eighteen years mostly creating imagery
about the lives of women. He searches for what lies beneath the surface of his
subjects, empowering each one he encounters. He has recently ventured into the
realm of surrealism, creating powerful imagery that reflects on our humanity
while dealing with the meaning and power of art.

Stull
say’s, “My work has allowed me to venture past the camera into the realm
of a humanist, an artistic life, delving into the intellectual, a more cerebral
life experience, creating what I call ‘connectivism.'”

His
ongoing work is based in large-scale digital photography accompanied by
sculpture/body casts, composition art, painting, poetry/prose and drawings.
His art is then integrated, collectively, into exhibitions to provide the
viewer a once in a lifetime experience. The presentation of the work is
delivered to the viewer in a unique and emotionally powerful way.

Stull,
71, a self-taught artist, works in many artistic disciplines. Educated at San
Diego State University
with degrees in psychology, economics and philosophy during the 1960’s, amidst
the backdrop of the counter-culture revolution and the Viet Nam War, where his
social consciousness and political views were shaped. Stull emerged from a
Catholic Irish/German family, one of five children where work, discipline and
religion took precedence over emotional expressions of the self – a different
kind of loving environment. Being a husband of thirty-plus years and father to
two has taught him the power of kindness, love and commitment.

His latest
book is the fine art photography book, Encounters.

Visit his website at www.patrickstull.com.

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