Don Porter, a lifelong California artist, was taught and mentored by some of the finest: Gui Ignon in Ojai, California and, at the University of California, Berkeley, by Elmer Bischoff, Jerrold Ballaine, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Hartman, Peter Voulkos - and many others along the way. Winner of numerous awards, Porter has exhibited his photographs, paintings and sculptures in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, North Carolina, Los Angeles, and Palm Springs. His photographs and paintings are collected world-wide. In addition to painting and traditional photography, Porter’s most recent work involves photographing temporary sculpture. As he manipulates various inanimate objects and introduces them to baths of pigmented liquids, he subjects the ever-changing configurations to layers of light (filtered, reflected and refracted). He photographs these fabrications as they transform, dissolve, disintegrate … cease to be what they were. “I do not use Photoshop or the like. Intentionally designing the sculptures to transcend a preceding moment of existence. I record that exact instance of transformation as a requiem for each moment that was, all the while conceding, even celebrating the impermanence of all that exists …. did exist.” “The cohesiveness of my images is with the process itself, not so much with the images or series of images - which I tend not to do. No moment is the same as any other, nor are any of my temporary sculptures the same as any others. Each of these images is a portrait of my artistic intentions and decisions at a particular time. I may not always know what will come next in the process, but I am enlivened and pleased enough with the process and results that I regard it as an addiction to abstract spirituality.”
