Anamorphosis and Intimacy : Kurt Lolo's Photograph of the Great Spotted Woodpecker

It is an adventure to explore the creative world of a person, because their art is their soul made visible, with its dreams, its perspectives, and each artist is a new universe to discover, to understand, to then share, and give wings through my words. It is my pleasure and privileged honour to know several Kabyle nature photographers who express themselves in their art the way painters do with their brushes and canvases : Djamil Diboune, Katia Djabri, Chamy Tout Court and recently, Kurt Lolo.
On October 5th, Kurt Lolo shared the photograph of a great spotted woodpecker, Dendrocopos major , and this woodpecker is found throughout Eurasia and North Africa. It is a beautiful bird, with its coat in an eccentric pattern of black and white feathers, and its red belly. Kurt Lolo's photography shows a unique style, in the ability to create photographs that are very fluid, that create a feeling of three dimensional paintings, of which the paint is still wet, which imbues his photos with an intense light. The wet effect of his photographs is in precise balance with the crisp lines of his compositions, and a beautiful example of this technique is his photo of the great spotted woodpecker. It shows the bird in the middle of branches and all the branches and their leaves could have obscured the woodpecker, but as the effect of the colours is fluid, open, like a three dimensional image, our eyes are able to push aside the foliage, and observe the long, fine beak the woodpecker uses for drumming, as a way to communicate, and to quietly appreciate this intimate and charming portrait of this bird. The drumming of the woodpecker is well known, and their long beak is also useful to excavate holes for their nest, and to catch insects, cut fruit, and to break open eggs of other birds, to suck up tree sap, and also to eat small animals as part of their diet. The size of a woodpecker can vary between 7cm, so 2.7 inches, for the smallest species, and up to 50cm, so 19.6 inches, for the largest species, the Mulleripicus pulverulentus, that can be found in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Woodpeckers have feet that are zygodactyl, which means that they have four toes, of which the first and the fourth toe faces backwards, and the second and the third toe faces forward, allowing them to hang onto tree trunks and branches very well, and also allowing them to basically walk up a tree vertically. They have long and sticky tongues, which faciltates the eating of insects and larvae hidden underneath tree bark.
Kurt  Lolo's photograph of the great spotted woodpecker is interesting, because of its intimate light, and because of the effect of suggesting anamorphosis, which made me revisit the drawings of British artist Julian Beever ( 1959 ), who is famous for his large chalk drawings he started creating in the mid 1990's, done on big surfaces like public sidewalks, which he then puts to memory in photographs, often with the inclusion of a person, to enhance the three dimensional effect of his art. Julian Beever uses a technique of projection, anamorphosis, to create the illusion of three dimensions when the drawings are seen from a certain angle. In the photography of Kurt Lolo, the three dimensional illusion is created in a micro version, and that often gives his photographs the impression of being sculpted, like the marvelous photograph of his crystal moon, to which I dedicated an article on October 3rd, " An Otherwordly Visit : The Crystal Moon of Kurt Lolo ". The contrast between  compositions sculpted as were it out of liquid glass, and the three dimenional effect of the technique of anamorphosis, give the nature photography of Kurt Lolo an artistic presence that is meditative and that indicates a capacity for passion that knows how to express itself with nuance and reassurance.
Trudi Ralston.

The information on the great spotted woodpecker, dendrocopos major, and on the artist Julian Beever and three dimensional art, courtesy of Wikipedia.