"In the end, the fact that Kincaid’s pictures are fabrications becomes irrelevant. Terms batted about under contemporary discourse fall away in the presence of deep forests, distant peaks, churning waves and foreboding icebergs that speak of a power greater than man, which put him at its mercy. Grandiloquent reveries, his pictures draw us into a milieu that encourages communication with nature on an intimate level, leaving behind the world of technology from which they were spawned."
-Janet Kutner
"Among the first things an artist learns when learning to draw is how to see: how to see more than think; to see a thing not so much for what it has come to mean subjectively as for what it appears to be objectively; to see what that thing is shaped like and how it relates in space to all the other things around it.
The photo-based work of Ted Kincaid may itself be an illustration. For one thing, his medium, perhaps more than any other, proves the disparity between what we see and what we think we see. If Picasso was right, that “art is a lie,” then photography is a whopper, and Kincaid, a Dallas-based artist acclaimed for nuanced, digital manipulation, can stretch the truth like nobody’s business.
In the process, he also demonstrates that our visual assessment of a subject often comes about as the result of another mental machination, the stitching together of a series of more tightly cropped details, which we’ve imaged, one-by-one, on our own. Sure, we can see an entire tree, but in reality our wandering eyes more often take it in as a series of smaller “shots.” A glance here, a glance there, and, in our heads, ta-da, a tree.
Much has been made about Kincaid’s “kinship with painting” as well as getting into specifics about his digital manipulations. Perhaps it’s necessary. Here in Dallas, we may still need to draw out the last few holdouts reluctant to grant photography its legitimacy as an art form; and some folks don’t like it when your art comes too easily to you.
But excessive exposition can suck the life and the art right out of a thing. Kincaid has found plenty of wonder for his wandering eye to light upon. It’s just a matter of knowing how to look."
- James Michael Starr, D Magazine