SEE SERENELY
Explore the Zen-like power of photo minimalism
The main advice photographer David Fokos offers: “Focus.” (Aptly enough, he pronounces his name the same way.) Concentrate, he says, on the essence of the image, reducing or eliminating everything else. The San Diego based artist has been exhibited around the world, and his style is likened to visual haiku.
Interview with David Fokos
#1 Please introduce yourself.
Hello, my name is David Fokos. I am a full-time photographic artist living in San Diego, California. I have been photographing with my 8×10 view camera for over 30 years, much of that time on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the southeastern coast of Massachusetts.
My work, which is represented by 15 galleries on three continents, has been featured in over 40 solo exhibitions and can be found in the collections of many museums, corporations and private collectors.
#2 How did you get interested in photography?
My grandfather gave me my first camera — a Kodak Brownie — when I was 11 years old. Interestingly, rather than the usual sort of family holiday snapshots one might expect of an 11 year old, I was already showing an affinity for the landscape and a certain type of composition — taking pictures of the patterns found in the cobblestone streets, looming church spires, and zoomy perspectives along building facades.
Welcome To The Jungle
By Thomas Shess
There is a pattern of passions in Fred Gemmell. He speaks with the enlightened energy of Julia Child; listen long enough and Gemmell might have you salivating over shapes, colors and exotic materials.
A passionate painter and a nascent gallery owner (his gallery participated in Art San Diego 2011), Gemmell is an engineer by degree, an architect by training, a furniture maker by trade and a legendary commercial and residential interior designer.
TAILOR MADE
WRITTEN BY IRENE LACHER
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GREY CRAWFORD
One could sum up this contemporary home with a sweeping view of La Jolla Shores in a single word: Balance. The collaboration between architect William Hayer, of Hayer Architecture in Del Mar, and San Diego-based designer Fred Gemmell, of Matrix Design Studio, accomplishes a delicate dance between opposites: warm and cool materials, blustery nature and the serenity of home, husband and wife.
Indeed, when the couple–the owner of an investment company with offices in San Diego and Greenwich, Connecticute, and his wife, a full-time mother of four–came to the designers with a veritable tabula rasa, a vacant lot overlooking the Pacific Ocean, they presented a seemingly impossible task. The wife loved pure minimalism. “I could live in a cement box,” she jokes, but the husband wanted his living space to feel warm and inviting, not like a museum.