Artist
Paul Shirkey
Paul Shirkey is a photographer, climber, & cyclist, who is learning to paint. Home is and always will be Oregon.
I started with photography mountaineering in the Oregon & North Cascades in the late 80’s, inspired by Sierra mountaineer, Galen Rowel. I’ve diverge greatly from that starting point, but I’m still grateful for Rowel’s inspiration & writing. After spending a year in South America in 2000, shooting slides with my Contax G2, I started to educate myself in the art of photography, took a class at U of Oregon, and a workshop with John Sexton in 2005. I gravitated towards Paul Strand, Minor White, and Brett Weston, bought a 4×5 and haven’t shot a slide since. I’ve become interested in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work on the horizon and conceptual photography. I’m looking for a 8×10 to make some contact prints of still life’s, portraits, and urban landscapes.
Past Shows
Inherient Patterns
DIVA (Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts), Eugene Oregon, November – December 2006, Solo show of 26 B&W silver gelatin prints
State Capitol Rotunda, Salem Oregon, 2006, Joint show with the Corvallis Photoarts guild
Guistina Gallery, Oregon State University, 2005, Bi-annual joint show of the Corvallis Photoarts guild
Two Views of Reality
Unitarian Fellowship Gallery, Corvallis Oregon, 2004, Joint show with Carolyn Madsen, Color cibachrome prints
About This Website
Counter Point
The design of this website is an ongoing process, as it’s an extension of my art work. It is designed in part to serve as a counter point to the billions of pixels that harass their viewers with ugliness, visual distractions, and slobbering advertisements. It’s unfortunate that so many people insist on, or at least passively accept, the degrading visual space in which we live. Almost always, the only thing separating ugliness from beauty is some care and thought, be it in pixels, wood, or stone.
Today, no website is built from scratch. This is site is built on the Wordpress foundation with a rewritten theme and rewritten supporting machinery. The theme originally was from Ulf Pettersson, and is called Modern . But overtime, it drifts further and further from it’s roots, becoming specialized to it’s purpose here.