Now out from Otoliths

Otoliths has just released karl kempton’s portraiture: oceano dunes to tide line.

karl kempton
portraiture: oceano dunes to tide line
full color
157 pages
ISBN: 978-0-6455483-0-3
$US34.95
Direct URL: https://www.lulu.com/shop/karl-kempton/portraiture-oceano-dunes-to-tide-line/paperback/product-m2d5wdv.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Until midnight this Friday, Lulu have a 20% discount running. Promo code: PREVIEW20. Promo codes for future weeks can be found each Monday at the Lulu Press Facebook page.

portraiture: oceano dunes to tide line, volume 11 of discourses, is a collection of photographed forms and objects presented as individual portraits from the oceano dunes to oceano beach tideline on the southern portion of california’s central coast. the discourses series documents poetically and photographically kempton’s insights into his local environment.

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When I first was introduced karl kempton’s work he was doing a series of visual poems called “runes.” The runes were highly textural in nature, and amazing because they were so carefully created on a typewriter. I see the same care in these new works, although since they are photographs the care is in karl’s perceptive eye defining these stunning images. For these portraits of how the sea paints the shore are also runes in the sense that they have the magical quality that some people ascribe to runes - certainly they have the ability to change how one perceives the world. The images captured here transcend mere visual poetry or photography and their simplicity / complexity invites us to contemplate the ineffable.

— K.S. Ernst

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Most pieces in Karl Kempton's beautiful and intriguing collection of untitled photographs are close-ups of tiny things solely or mostly made of sand by the wind. They are frozen in their unfinished gestures, which communicate with us. I mean they are in the process of starting a new, more abstract and ideogrammatic life, morphing from nameless constellations into barely recognizable quasi-symbols of trees, birds, flowers and human shapes, especially faces — in our imagination. At the same time, a simultaneously strong impression of their uniqueness and material vulnerability remains with us and contribute to the effect of seeing them animated. They have anima. The intensity and ambiguity of the images also calls into mind Henri Michaux’s memorable ink blots. But in Portraiture, background and foreground, "canvas" and composition are written by the same undulation of the sand dunes. So a third, concurrent impression might be that there is no separation at all.

— Márton Koppány

karl kempton (b. july 1, 1943, chicago) lives with ruth, his beloved wife, in oceano, california. he is a poet, visual poet, editor, publisher, writer, photographer, curator, archaeo-astronomer, and environmental activist. they are retired micro-green growers of sprouts and wheatgrass using biodynamic additives. their daughter, amy franceschini, a widely respected and influential international artist, is the founder of futurefamers.

his lexical and visual poems and photography have been widely published nationally and internationally with over 45 print and over 15 web titles. He is considered the architect of the chumash heritage national marine sanctuary currently in designation process protecting over 7,000 square miles of marine environments and oceanographic features along the southern portion of the central coast of california.