S. K. Yeatts has a Liberal Arts degree from Baylor University and formerly served as Executive Director leading user-experience and graphic design groups for a Fortune 50 Company. He is currently living in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife Janette, focusing on "Post-Photographic Impressionist" art as well as poetic and literary works.

ARTISTIC DIRECTION

I work in a unique blend of photography and painting that I refer to as "Post-Photographic Impressionism". While I value the detail photography can generate, even the finest compositions can come-off too much like documentary snapshots that somehow feel static and lifeless. Impressionist paintings, on the other hand, have an internal rhythm and movement of light that better approximates how the experiential moment felt to the observer, yet even these stylistic works can lack deeper layers of detail—offering a vision that can collapse if viewed at close-range. My concept fuses both the energy of the moment's impression with an intricacy of detail that can be visually sustained even at massive-scale prints (e.g., or viewed up-close in galleries, hotel lobbies or residential settings).

Aside from any specific technique, art must reverberate with the eternal, and in the end, stand as meditations on how it feels to be briefly alive, delivering a distillation of transcendent experience, woven of mystery and beauty. If, via this hybrid fusion of painting and photography, an image achieves some vital re-animation of the eternal moment, then I will have considered this artistic experiment in Post-Photographic Impressionism to have been a success.

PROCESS

I take multiple photographs of a subject/scene with a Canon EOS 5DSR (50 megapixel resolution) and stitch these individual shots together into a unified mosaic—rendering a digital negative that is upwards of 400 megapixels in size. Considering that a large-format film camera would equivalently generate only about a 100 megapixel negative, these composite images represent extreme levels of resolution. I then hand-manipulate various structural edges within the image using custom software to stylize and bring-out the internal flow of the scene, hopefully capturing a more direct impression of the day.

The other direction I am taking with this Post-Photographic Impressionistic work (besides printing all my pieces exclusively in large format editions) is to commit to create each image as a one-of-a-kind production. I do not offer limited editions—as each piece, much like a painting or sculpture is unique.