Artist profile - Colin Serjent

I specialise in abstract photography. I've always been interested in abstraction in arts in all its varied forms. I used to produce abstract expressionist paintings.
It's hard to describe, but a number of my photographs are very painterly. They contain, in varying degrees, a combination of many tones of colour, shapes, and sometimes dense textures and patterns.

People sometimes make reference to the way I have manipulated my images. I have to point out that none of my pictures are produced through manipulation. All of my photographs are non-digital. I basically use a Nikon 801, compose and take a photograph, and that's it!

I still possess a strong sense of keeping my photographs, in a sense, pure. I donít like manipulation for its own sake. What I see through the viewfinder is ultimately what I want printed, framed and exhibited.

The main themes of my abstract images incorporate naturalness, decay or erosion, sense of time, sensuousness, colour relationships, and silhouettes and shadows.

I use old walls, hoardings of torn posters, weather-beaten doors, derelict buildings, and various other decayed elements, fragments of man-made objects, together with weather ravaged natural objects such as tree bark as subjects for my shots.

I have staged or been involved in numerous exhibitions, both in this country and abroad. Including Savannah, (Georgia) Cologne, Brussels, and Liverpool and Manchester.

Before concentrating on abstraction in my photography, I worked in the field of documenting music events, in particular World Music events, which included undertaking a number of major commissions for WOMAD (World of Music, Art & Dance).

I loved doing it, which included travelling to large scale music festivals in several countries, but you can only go so far being on the lip of a stage doing portraits and the rest.

A selection of 16 my abstract works can be found on the website: http://www.notthetate.co.uk