| GALLERY 1 - Floral Montage Works GALLERY 2 - Abstract Digital Paintings GALLERY 3 - Shaped Floral Canvas Works |
GALLERY 4 - Digital Montages BACKGROUND and SHOWS HISTORY of ARTIST |
LINKS HOME |
HISTORY AS AN ARTIST, page 3 The New Technology. 1984 to 2002. During the 1980's while I was deeply involved with using a large format camera and making type C Kodak color prints I was also getting my first taste of the approaching technology revolution which would soon invade the photographic world to change it inevitably and irrevocably. In 1984 Apple introduced the first MAC computer and I soon bought one through Cornell. This was an exciting experience although I did not know how to use this for much more the text writing and editing |
|
 |
Then in 1985 I learned that Cornell had a grant program funded through IBM in which IBM would supply state of the art computer equipment to faculty for research. I applied and received a grant of $20,000 for equipment, a computer, software, and a IBM color printer, the first ever of it's kind. But I wanted to use this for making images, not writing text or crunching numbers, so I went in search of graphics software. By chance I found an inexpensive paint program at the Cornell Campus Store which would allow me to paint with 16 colors. Starting with that I began to make abstract color images, focusing on the pixels and combinations of pixels, just like the French painter Seraut had done in the 19th century with daubs of paint. Additionally I found I could easily manipulate the images, such as duplicate and repeat sections, "inverse" (reverse) the color of pixels, rotate sections making them turn 90% either direction or flip horizontal or vertical. All this was new to me and quite exciting. When finished I printed out these images on my IBM printer, cut them in squares, and pasted them together into a larger work by taping them together on the backside with clear cellophane tape. It was primitive at the time but it allowed me to begin my exploration of the basics of digital imaging. |
| About the same time a fortunate conversation with a Cornell College staff member opened up the window of my vision about the possibilities of this new technology for photography. Sitting in his office one day I said to him that I would really like to be able to work with an image in the darkroom and for example take an arm that was hanging down and move it around so it was stretched up. I said this was almost impossible to do in a darkroom. His reply was, "Well, you know, you can probably do that on the computer". Suddenly the possibility of computer manipulation of images dawned on me. If I could digitize photographic images then the sort of image manipulation I desired was possible. This propelled me to go across campus and search out people who were just beginning to explore the use of the computer for creating and editing graphic images. |
|
 |
Not long after getting my IBM research equipment I came across some other new equipment that really excited me. A colleague invited me to a demo on campus by a company called Truevision that was showing a graphics board they had designed that would capture video images, called the ICB. This board was connected to an external video camera that could capture still images. They had also designed a software program called TIPS for manipulating these images with much greater possibilities than I had with my simple Campus Store bought software. Fortunately the Truevision folks were willing to loan their equipment to Cornell for a while, and about a month later I was offered the equipment and set up a station in my campus studio. One of the first undertakings was to invite professor colleagues and students into my studio, grab images of them, and then manipulate the images in TIPS. What fascinated me was the possibility to duplicate 1/2 of a face, flip it over, and get a completely symmetrical face, something that does not occur in nature. This was an exciting time and I created my first series of digital images that were shown later in several gallery exhibitions. |
| As time went on I bought a video camera and experimented more and more with grabbing images and importing them for manipulation into the computer. But grabbed video images at that time were rather low resolution and not satisfying to someone acquainted with the detail of an 8x10 film camera image. So I began to search for a way to get higher resolution images, and the first breakthrough came when in the late 1980's I discovered and purchased a Microtek flatbed scanner. Suddenly I had a crispness and detail not available through video images. This was the beginning of my ongoing use of the scanner as a means for importing images into the computer arena, a way of working that continues today. |
|
 |
In the early 1990's I scanned in photo images as the digital still camera had not yet arrived, and would not really appear for general consumers until the Kodak introduced their DC line in 1996. I gathered printed images from magazines, newspapers and other printed sources which I then used in my works. I also was able to scan film negatives and prints made with a standard film camera on my flatbed camera and use these in image collages. Then I came across Photoshop that Adobe had released in 1990, and was blown away by possibilities. However initially I was not able to use the program as I only had a PC computer and Photoshop was a MAC only program. But then in 1993 the Windows PC version of Photoshop appeared and I jumped into image editing on Photoshop with both feet. |
When shifting to a new medium it is not uncommon for an artist to struggle a while to establish a voice. It is a matter of really beginning to understand the materials and how one can relate them to one's personal life experiences. It is a matter of becoming fluent with the new language which is necessary for artistic expression. Even though I started doing some imaging on the computer in the 1980's I would have to say that I began to feel comfortable with this new technology and found my ways of expression at about the end of the 1990's. It also corresponded with my retirement from teaching at Cornell, allowing me the chance to follow my desires as an artist more or less full time. |
|
|
My first art exploration after leaving teaching began in 2000. I was inspired to try some painting the which I had done off and on for more than 40 years. But as I worked on painting in acrylics on canvases I became convinced they needed something more. So I scanned in objects on the flatbed scanner and printed them out on canvas on a recently purchased Encad wider format printer. Then I cut these out with a sharp knife and glued them down on top of the painted canvases. This became a very interesting series of multimedia collages, a meeting of traditional acrylic painting with digital images. Also in the same period of time I began my first really significant series of digital only art images. Working still with a flatbed scanner I began to archive all sorts of objects and montage these together on the computer in Photoshop, sometimes with a few digital camera shots added. This first series stretched on into 2002 and included sometimes strange combinations of objects. On one hand this seemed a natural continuation of what I had been doing with my photographic collages made on a copy stand some ten years earlier, only now it was infinitely easier to piece elements together in Photoshop. Moreover it offered so many more possibilities of arrangement and manipulations. At the same time these digital montages afforded me the opportunity to reconnect with my strong design background from my years as an architect, and to challenge me to find just the right organization to satisfy me. Finally I had always been interested in strong contrasts and juxtapositions of dissimilar objects, and this held full sway in these works. |
| GALLERY 1 - Floral Montage Works GALLERY 2 - Abstract Digital Paintings GALLERY 3 - Shaped Floral Canvas Works |
GALLERY 4 - Digital Montages BACKGROUND and SHOWS HISTORY of ARTIST |
LINKS HOME |