The Fragile Nature of Hope
Layered within a global pandemic, compounding personal struggle, and the continual quest for hope, the current collection captures the fragility of life as mirrored within the natural world. This new body of work painstakingly captures powerful emotional experiences in nature through epic-scale, immersive abstract photography. Seven hauntingly dynamic photographs intertwine the dark emotions of loss and suffering with the beauty and light of resilience. The resulting uplifting art embodies and queries
the nature of hope, which Thomae defines as finding joy through darkness.
Accidentally capturing mesmerizing surface water patterns in "Fall Leaves, Water” led to a two year exploration of seeing what is not there in the complex relationships between shifting water, light, nature, time, and the artist’s own demons and angels. Abandoning all rules of “good” photography allowed the development of a new palette of unconventional tools that enabled the transition from realism to impressionism and expressionism. The natural world, and this new palette, became a canvas to communicate challenging emotions. In dedicated solo field time, the question, “what do I feel?” completely transcended the traditional “what do I see?” Weeks and months of iterative post-production and proofing to scale, ultimately looking at individual pixels and how they support the vision of each piece, result in mesmerizing, avant-garde epic-scale works in the Dusseldorf style, each of which is the culmination of hundreds of hours of combined field and technical work.
Limited Edition of 100 large scale metal prints and 100 small paper prints of each image.
