Linda Barsotti
Linda Barsotti’s fine art photography concentrates on exploring fragments, analyzing the surroundings to create abstractions. Removing extraneous surroundings, concentration is placed on the interplay of lines and movement. Modernism is her muse. Linda’s background in Floral Design and Floral Art establishes the foundation for her transition to Photography.
Linda has studied photography at the San Francisco Academy of Art and the College of San Mateo in addition to independent studies at various workshops. Studies included both film and darkroom techniques, digital and most currently experiments in scanning (camera-less) techniques.
Her works have been exhibited in many galleries and published twice in Black and White Magazine. Linda started a fine art photography guild, the Peninsula Photographic Arts Guild, on the San Francisco Peninsula to establish a creative and nurturing environment where photographers can discuss, collaborate on and exhibit new bodies of work.
Linda is currently expanding her portfolio by exploring ideologies in Documentary Photography. Her innate ability to challenge herself produces unique approaches to new work. She has photos of and recorded interviews with Drag Queens. A book combining images and text (their story) is in the making.
Artist’s Statement
Influenced by the Modernist movement, I explore the formal qualities of abstraction and sculpt everyday materials, scan the fragments layering and forming something new.
Musings on the Mundane is a personal exploration of man-made, household materials used daily yet go unnoticed. We recognize them for their utilitarian purpose; we are unsettled if inventory wanes. They tend to blend within their environment. My impersonal response to and manipulation of each creates a visual rhythm of alternative shapes and forms freeing them from their utilitarian value. Familiar and mundane things such as plastic bags, paper, an artist journal, toilet paper and newspaper become new and ambiguous. I experiment with textures, form and line removing visual references and triggering a transition from function to form. They are now recognized as something unrecognizable, a sort of collision between the representational and the abstract.
The work is solely a personal self-gratification of the tactile experience of working with the materials: folding, crushing, squeezing, ripping, and immortalizing its elegance. After the process I have a souvenir of a moment, however fleeting.