Artist's Statement
I have been involved in the arts since I was a child. As a teenager I was so infatuated with Monet that I would spend hours staring at his Water Lilies. My B.A. from Queens College in NYC included a major in filmmaking and a minor in the fine arts. All night sessions with an oil painting were common.
Entering the world of digital manipulation in 1997, I found the perfect way to combine my interests in film and painting. Working from my original 35mm photographs, I use the tools of several photography programs to manipulate and paint with the elements of the picture.
I follow what the pixels want to do. As I experiment, I find the inner story that the pixels are trying to express. While totally different, it is somehow amazingly similar to a sculptor finding the curves and angles of a figure inherent in a block of stone. But my elements are:
(1) the original photograph
(2) the composition
(3) the tools of my photographic programs
(4) the individual colored pixels and their relationships to each other
(5) the vision that calls out from the essence of what the picture strives to be.
Working on the computer becomes the technical equivalent of painting with oils. For instance, increasing saturation not only changes the hue and makes the color stronger, but also transforms the pixels to create a more painterly look. Excessive sharpening actually creates the opposite effect by separating the pixels to achieve a pointillistic effect like that of Seurat. And using the paintbrush to color over blemishes can flatten a particular color area in a manner similar to Gauguin, or even Manet. Thus the special qualities inherent in pixels are used to full advantage to create my Digital Photopaintings. |
