Plastic Paint 1952

Brett Weston’s gelatin silver print, titled ‘Plastic Paint’, transforms the mundane into the marvelous, a bit like turning base metal into gold. The image is layered with radiating textures, kind of like when you let house paint skins dry and then peel them up. These are interjected with geometric shards, some in high contrast, some soft and blurred. It’s unclear what we’re seeing, or how Weston made it. But that’s the magic, right? Look at the lower central area – radiating bursts of spiky forms shoot outwards from a central point. It’s like some weirdly organic explosion, stopped in time. The dark blacks against the white gives the image a real sense of depth and energy, reminding me of the abstract expressionist photography of Aaron Siskind, who took super close-up shots of peeling paint, revealing the hidden beauty in decay. Weston, like Siskind, finds abstraction in the everyday, turning the ordinary into something quite extraordinary.