Honey Painting

Born in Windsor, Canada in 1956 Deborah sensed the potential of the camera to communicate beyond words, even in fun, in 1972 with a 35mm Yashica, when she began developing a visual language based on movement, color, form and gesture, using the imaging power to record the emotional energy of people and places. Ten years later by 1982, based in Vancouver, Canada, she was an architectural photographer with full knowledge of the earliest computer techniques. In 1998 she collaborated with the New York Times and Vogue Australia, then subsequently worked in fashion, portraiture, sponsored cultural events as well as an important fine art photography projects. Her first show was in 1995 in the Candace Perich Gallery in Connecticut and New York where she showed alongside American great Robert Mapplethorpe. Xian, her first abstract show, was held in 1998 in the Aldo Coppola Gallery in Milan and soon afterward in the Manz Modern Art Gallery, Prague. Notable attention for portraits shown in the IN BRERA gallery in Milan in 2000, and her nude photography show three months later “The Secret Garden" in the same gallery. Deborah extended her artistic mind to abstract painting where colors and fantasy work in synergy in what she addresses as decorative interior art. “Deborah’s eye, revealing the language of color, sees the realia, harmonies which overshoot the boundaries of sensory perception to shatter the opaline crystals of common sense. Thus our soul rediscovers its strongest ability: the intermediation between perceptions derived from the sensitive world and spiritual world. With her images, Deborah depicts color relationships found in nature that effortlessly provide the viewer with an instinctive sensory conversation and comprehension of nature itself. Colors are not just a seduction in life and poetry, but foremost a fascinating philosophical problem related to their meaning, inter-play and existence or non existence, from Aristotelians, Kant, Husserl to Wittgenstein. What color is a leaf: the green seen at noon or the black we see at night? When we say “red” or “green” are we indicating something real and concrete or using the word merely metaphorically, a translation by our brain to define wavelengths when light hits our cerebral cortex or as translated by the photo camera? Is it true that blue retains the idea of infinity, stimulating purity of nostalgia and supernatural? What do we get from colors reflecting where light permits? Thinkers and wise men, as Goethe, Rousseau, Herder, Steiner and many more, say primitive Man had the ability to see directly the colored and animistic essence of things, where civilized Man lost it completely. Could it be that Deborah reinstates in her own way the power of seeing the true essence of things through a digital camera or her paintings? For her understanding is seeing, the iris is her tool, the camera is her range, the stop motion the punctum the instant she captures her realia. This is Zone 11’s philosophy: images reflect the change of time, the dynamics towards the future and the culture of pixels and visual prosthesis. Does the human specie’s evolution and progress recover and expand the lost sensorial perceptions? Does the homo faber regain his ludens (artistic) and sapiens (physical and metaphysical power) sides through technology? Deborah Savoie tries to “see” her own way. It is her “creative writing”. Cosimo Mero Art Curator