I'm often questioned as to whether or not I see digital image development as being less authentic or of less value than a hand made image. I work between the two so perhaps I ought to unpick my thoughts on the issue in relation to the work I'm currently involved with.
I am of an age whereby the computer came into my life quite late. I had already been working as an artist and teaching art for a while, and when they emerged as a possible tool for making art, because I was a printmaking tutor, the first two AppleMac Classics that the college brought came to me and I began to use them as printmaking tools. Because of this, I have always regarded the two dimensional possibilities that various computer hardware and softwares provide as being simply technical processes, just like etching or silkscreen and have never worried about whether these are images for screen or for final print output. As a printmaker I was very aware that changing paper stock changed how a colour would read and the fact that screen colour would sometimes need to be re-calibrated, meant that just like paper, screens could affect how a colour was read. If you are a printmaker you are always interested in how a shift in technology shapes outputs. For instance a change in acid will affect the bite of an aquatint or a different mesh size the way the ink sits on a silkscreen print. The images below are all from recent work, all of which I regard as an extension of the print process, but because they have a digital form, I also see them as being made for screen viewing. These images have been processed by various technologies and most importantly as far as i am concerned, the imagery relies on my ability to draw and make certain marks using pens and inks, brushes and paints and a variety of other tools to create forms and textures. By grounding my work in these analogue processes I'm very aware that my body and its traces are central to how images develop. However I also see computer hardware and software as being extensions of our bodies, but these extensions are harder to grasp in terms of physical traces. It is very easy to see the mark of an artist's hand movement in the way a drawing is made with charcoal on paper, but much harder to see traces of the human in the proportions of a screen or the invisible code written to form a colour-shape. But these things are all the product of humans, just as much as an arm swinging an ax. The computer allows me in particular to explore colour possibilities. I can develop very controlled palettes for an image, and in doing so find an unexplored colour sensibility, which can surprise and offer totally new thoughts as to the emotional range that colour can produce. The computer aided images below come from two related but different groups of artworks. The top two are reflections on different feelings or sensations that I have had within my own body, my somatic awareness or interoception of an event and the bottom two are concerned with how perception and interoception are inseparable and they all began by making drawings in response to a series of visual encounters with other people, (rather in the mode of traditional portraits, but done over time and never from a still or frozen moment) and then the images were reworked in response to extended conversations that opened out my awareness of these people's internal feelings and so they became more to do with representations of an inner psyche or the layering of interoception into a previous visually focused perceptual experience. I. e. how we think visually about inner sensations is helped along by making analogies with things we have seen out there in the external world. These images all begin on paper, with lots of flowing liquids and the use of various applicators. Once they are made, the images are then photographed under moving natural light, so that colour and texture are embedded into tonal movement. This procedure allows me to develop two bodies of work, that can then be compared and contrasted as to how well they allow me to reflect on and adjust formal qualities in relation to their ability to communicate inner feelings or somatically driven sensations. Sometimes the computer allowed for more distancing, and more reflection; the screen operating in a similar way to the mirror in a painter' studio, it allowing me to see something again and to make very different types of decisions to ones that were made in the immanent moments of the actual experience. The analogue experience of material fluidity allowed for immediate responses to a situation, but the screen based work allowed for a necessary distancing in order to control what was being communicated. The freshness and immediacy of an experience, is very hard to capture but as a challenge it is exciting and hopefully as I continue making these images the process will lead to the development of a coherent language that can be understood by others.
All the images above were first of all constructed as hand made surfaces, often begun as felt-tip pen drawings, because these water soluble drawings are easily suffused into the layers of inks and other pigmented liquids that I make the drawings with. I can sharpen a form using pen and ink or soften it with a rag or soft brush and then it is finally photographed rather than scanned in and edited in Photoshop. The software allows you to work in layers and control transparency, processes that are vital to image development. You can view very subtle changes being made, as a transparency can be as subtle as one percent, you can turn layers on and off and make decisions as to whether or not to add something in or take something out, and you can take steps backwards and reverse a series of decisions, if they seem to be going in the wrong direction. These things are unique to this method of working and are part of a computer aided artwork's media specificity. What I am not doing is trying to imitate what the analogue working methods can do, each method and process has its own value, and like all encounters with other things, you need to be sensitive to their needs just as much as your own. Whilst on the computer I can work towards print outputs or screen; testing papers by printing off on different types of surface and looking at how images appear on other screens, to ensure that the resultant image is able to be translated across both screen and paper outlets. This method also allows me to open the work out in other directions and I have at times animated the images and added sound to them, once digital, all forms belong to the same world and they can be combined in ways previously unthought of.
I strongly believe that it is collage that sits in the space between analogue and digital drawing. In particular Rauschenberg's use of image transfer techniques back in the late 1950s, demonstrated how printing technologies and drawing technologies could be fused together. All I am doing is following in his footsteps and fusing the handmade mark with a new technical process. Recent images have used collage techniques alongside drawing processes fusing them together by layering, in a very similar way to how Rauschenberg used the pencil rubbling techniques to both transfer images and draw directly into the surface of his monoprints.
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