You see this bad boy right here? This is the heavily weathered floor of an old two man boat sitting barely out of the water near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in some cheap little campground. It boasts a few layers of different color paint, thick rivets and grooves, a fine treatment of slime and rust, and the mangled remnants of some sort of upholstery.

Or to sum it up in fewer words, what you're looking at is visual TREASURE!

The world is full of all sorts of fabulous surfaces that lay silently about the most unfabulous places at times and I am (for lack of a better word) obsessed with them.

While it's not uncommon for a vacationing dad to bring along the camera to catch the juicy bits of  trip to reflect on later it's probably less common for said father figure to expend far less clicks on the wife tanning or the kids chasing geese and instead run about on a mission to capture all the subtle nuances of cracked concrete slabs, gnarled tree bark, and sun bleached plastic. 

But every time I'm THAT guy. 

Bolting across the campground in an awkward Hunter S. Thompsonesque march, somewhere between a spider and an ostrich, knees up and ankles out, cackling all the way in search of the perfect texture.

Now of course this isn't completely without benefit. I do an awful lot of photo montages and I use these textures to give a more tactile feel to my work. But this isn't really about work. This is love.

It's not at all uncommon for a designer or visual artist to be attentive to the small details. I, however am known to simply fall in love with them. Every seemingly insignificant detail. I've found myself on more than one occasion standing less than a feet away from a tree just studying all of the little bumps and cracks in its armor, and the many shades of green lichen dancing across the surface. 

Like something out of Thoreau, I have almost trancendental experiences while observing textures. As if someone leaning face first into a dumpster with their mouth open wide gawking at rust spots wasn't enough, I enter some sort of trance, running my fingers across the ridges and creases as if only to assure myself they're real. An exemplary textured surface can keep me fixated for hours. 

A facet of my personality that my vacationing wife would probably be able to do without.

--Jonathan Thompson

Posted by Jonathan Thompson on May 13, 2012 at 04:26 pm EST

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