@pumpupyourbook ~ Spotlight Tour/#Giveaway ~ Encounters by Patrick Stull

With photography at its base, Stull offers a nuanced explication of
his encounters to allow the viewer an opportunity to form a relationship
with his art. While looking within ourselves, exploring our own
feelings, he hopes that he will inspire greater humaneness in response
to his art.

ENCOUNTERS is the second in a series of six large-format books in
which artist, photographer and author, Patrick Stull explores a wide
range of experiences. Using light and the physical body, the written
word and his artistry he creates imagery that examines aspects of the
lives of women.

Compiled over the last 18 years, the images in ENCOUNTERS, Stull
says, are meant to “inspire and challenge the observer while always
empowering the subject.”

Stull brings a powerful sense of the surreal and the spiritual to his
work as he plots a course along the many paths of the human experience.
His imagery runs from the ghostly and ephemeral to the flowing and
fiery.

As much as he concentrates on the human form, Stull never forgets to
focus on the humanity of his subjects. His choice of the coffee-table
style book format draws the viewer into an experience both intimate and
universal.

Stull’s first book in his series, titled EVOLVE, was published in
2006. A third book, titled HIDDEN DIMENSIONS, is completed and awaiting
publication. Future titles in the series include DHARMA, BEING
DIFFERENT, and YOGA, A HEALING MOMENT.

Stull hopes that his readers come away from the book with “a love for
art and a respect for the female who gives us life and challenges us to
be better human beings.

American artist Patrick Stull has spent the last eighteen years mostly creating imagery
about the lives of women. He searches for what lies beneath the surface of his
subjects, empowering each one he encounters. He has recently ventured into the
realm of surrealism, creating powerful imagery that reflects on our humanity
while dealing with the meaning and power of art.

Stull say’s, “My work has allowed me to venture past the camera into the realm
of a humanist, an artistic life, delving into the intellectual, a more cerebral
life experience, creating what I call ‘connectivism.'”  

His ongoing work is based in large-scale digital photography accompanied by
sculpture/body casts composition art, painting, poetry/prose, and drawings.
His art is then integrated, collectively, into exhibitions to provide the
viewer a once in a lifetime experience. The presentation of the work is
delivered to the viewer in a unique and emotionally powerful way. 

Stull, 71, a self-taught artist, works in many artistic disciplines. Educated at San
Diego State University with degrees in psychology, economics, and philosophy during the 1960s, amidst the backdrop of the counter-culture revolution and the Viet Nam War, where his social consciousness and political views were shaped. Stull emerged from a Catholic Irish/German family, one of five children where work, discipline, and religion took precedence over emotional expressions of the self – a different kind of loving environment. Being a husband of thirty-plus years and father to two has taught him the power of kindness, love, and commitment. 

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Good luck everyone!