Inkjet prints can be timid, recessive…I want my images to shimmer like enamel flames sprayed onto a 1963 Harley gas tank. I want the ink to announce boldly: “when I grow up I’m going to be as strong as paint!” So by showing some of the work unframed, not under glass, I want to celebrate the glistening ink dancing on and a little above the substrate. In this fast fashion throwaway world craft remains important, and surrounded as we are by online images, printmaking’s tactile qualities reveal a richness that even the best screens cannot portray…
Digital imaging is its own original printmaking medium: the original comes out of the printer, not the monitor or whatever ideation the project started with. The process enables a confluence of visual sources and personal influences in the service of making something new and unique, as opposed to the republication of existing work. Digital artistry mirrors that process of construction and deconstruction through which the past becomes the new, and through which we literally make our mark. But, for me, it’s just another pencil, taking its rightful place in the continuum of human mark-making.
I wrote years ago that For a long time I have not been comfortable “taking” a picture (those seen images of the world around me I can simply remember), preferring to “make” a picture instead…Our lives are collages of textures and impressions, input from here and from there, pastiches of pleasures recalled and pain endured. My current work too is not-so seamlessly cut and pasted, revised and revisited, and drawn upon from all my experience. Our daily lives may seem routine, so how nice it is to find that in our artspace we can paint caves again, or simply howl at the moon. I’ll leave the real world to those other photographers to place their well-worn rectangles upon, for the visions I assemble become truly my own.
Many years ago I used offset lithography (collaging above and below a giant graphic arts camera, making color separations by hand, printing limited editions on a Heidelberg offset press) as an original printmaking medium, although physical, time-consuming and toxic; the creative use of commercial methodology continues and is enabled by the amazing democratization and availability of sophisticated digital equipment. I print my own work so that I am in control, assiduously, over every speck and hue. With everyone now a capable image-maker we as artists must bring forth our best game, and provide substantive value added with our creations.
As an un-technical non-scientist I enjoy the low-level use of emerging technology, such as iPad finger paintings or app-level 3d captures which are sometimes the basis for new print series. I have a beginner’s mind when it comes to the understanding of digital concepts, in order to be able to look for connections between multiple disciplines. Self-taught in Photoshop I employ its simplest tools, so perhaps my lack of technical expertise frees me from the slick and glib. A traditional (sort of) printmaker with early twenty-first century tools, my layers dissolve, transform and republish themselves into a recombinant vision.
In the words of Helen Frankenthaler, “every mark is potentially loaded with our subconscious.” Marks create a kinship with generations past all the way back to cave painters. My work explores the interaction of analog and digital marks and their interface with organic forms such as flowers, through which I choreograph the ongoing dance between our human selves and our digital partners as we become increasingly and willingly cyborg, thereby enhancing and extending ourselves through our ever-changing technical abilities...marching joyfully, and sometimes fearfully but pliably, into the AI/robotic future we cannot fully perceive or anticipate.
Marks created digitally help me as an artist to plant my flag on the trembling soil, the shifting sand, of our present and uncertain planet. The work often reflects the gradual dissolution of natural forms amidst ongoing and persistent beauty, no doubt a reflection of and upon these crazy times. Nonetheless, despite an often pessimistic subtext so visualized with its attendant entropy, I reach for a balanced and cohesive, even optimistic, conclusion. Flowers reflect and assert the triumph of the spirit, for even as they wither they remain strong, deliberate and ascendant; their beauty, stamina and adaptability portray the eternal cycles of life on this earth.
For me photography has always been a mark-making medium and I have been weaving its spell back into my images, merging with painting and drawing in the aggregate. I want to pour myself into the work then send it out into the world, where the viewer’s lifelong experience massages and completes it if she chooses (yes Duchamp), providing enough complexity for variant interpretations and multiple inspections, and all the while distilling the (often complex) stated information down to just what needs to remain. I let one series evolve into the next, staying thematically connected but always trying to improve, experiment and keep moving. The work explores playfulness and light and peers into darkness; there is no need to limit or repeat oneself but reiteration can aid creative development.
Photography is my background and was my training in the arts, although I moved rapidly from black and white to glorious color photo-silkscreen and photo-lithography as an MFA student. My work does not fit neatly into existing art-pigeon-holes: although full of photographic process throughout, not enough of a photograph to be perceived as photography; not traditional enough for the printmakers; and way too low-tech for the new media folks. Yet I still see as a photographer and compose as one: almost invariably a new series begins with a prior period of actively photographing (although I just use a point and shoot or iPhone and only photograph colors, textures and forms that move me, to create a data base for image construction); and when I build digital images I still think in the zone system (thank you Ansel Adams), always requiring a true black (0,0,0 RGB) and a pure white (255, 255, 255 RGB) somewhere in the image.
So these prints are kind of a hybrid medium, reflecting the remembered thrill of the lithographic wash and savoring the history of experimental photography going back to Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, but eschewing the requirements of resolution-dependent commercial work with its formulaic outcomes. I want the prints to be able to speak and be seen from across the room yet reveal their nuances over time, to burn like the sun, yet never to rely solely on digital process for their part in the creative dialog. It’s amazing what can be done with just the Photoshop basics, of course turning their intended tools around in the interest of discovery rather than perfection. Years ago a reviewer commented on early digital work of mine by saying how hard can it be, you just push a button (as a belated newcomer to digital I thought it was plenty difficult). Well, maybe that’s becoming true in this Chat GPT AI world of content creation. I prefer to remember the words of a gallerist who wrote in my solo show statement: “This is computer art with a human hand embedded in its heart.” So let the digital ring with an analog truth. And I often leave some mistakes and glitches (which I call digital detritus) in the final image, perhaps as a reminder that nothing is flawless and that a human hand has indeed guided this experience.
Rauschenberg, the earliest influence on my path of hybrid picture-making, said something like: there’s art and there is life, I function between the two… Drawing hardwires us to the network of the soul and makes the unseen (and un-thought) tangible. Having worked in printmaking for so many decades now, both analog and digital, for me it’s still all about Ink on Paper. Although I have often been tempted to paint on, scrape or otherwise alter the substrate of the print, the unified surface remains my focus, as if the whole quantum of my creativity must be flattened to be revealed, to be seen, to be known. Layers compressed into a detailed and esoteric whole; multiple facets, the moment(s) made visible, even if I am the only one to observe.
I am mindful of this sentiment expressed by Julian Schnabel on the subject of mark-making: “I keep trying to make painting interesting and fun for myself. What I like about it is that there’s no answer. The thing about making movies, everyone wants to know what it means. But if they ask, ‘Why did you paint that mark?’ I don’t know, I felt like it.”When I work I sit down in solitude and without a plan, without thought as to the final form. "Process not product", Nathan Lyons would say at the Visual Studies Workshop. I let the process surprise and inform me and guide me towards a cohesive whole, one which I will only know when I get there.
I recognize the daily tension we all feel and experience as the digital evolves into the virtual, with the organic in us straining to keep up and accommodate the quantum pace of change. We are becoming, or have become, married into the cyborg symbiosis of our pixelated lives. To use the familiar cinematic metaphor, as our everyday digital skills evolve we come to believe we can fix our lives in post. Nonetheless, handwork (even the movement of the mouse or the stylus on the drawing tablet) is still very important and there’s barely a pixel of every image I haven’t peered at and labored over.
I may start with an idea, a vision or concept (which I almost never adhere to), but mostly just a mark or a bit of an image, and then another…my whole internal visual history stays on alert, enabling connections and inter-connections not even conscious. I turn the few Photoshop tools I know on their heads, making them my iterative friends, embracing the accident (yes Rauschenberg). Sometimes I’m amazed but more often frustrated by the struggle to birth the new while honoring the past. Each finished image is just the jumping-off point for the next, in the hope that the concretization of the ineffable becomes clearer and deeper as I persist, exploring the relationship between apparent dissolution and optimistic reconstruction and wandering through the penumbra between the deliberate and the random. An important function of the creative process, said Louise Bourgeois, is restoration: “…the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented- which is what fear and anxiety do to a person- into something whole.” But, if I may add, for the work to be more than journaled therapy there must be some universality.
Sometimes as an artist you do some work, just one piece even, that in the moment truly amazes you. How did I do that you may say, where did that even come from? It may not happen very often, in fact it does not, it almost never happens. But in that moment you are so lucky (or deluded, egotistical or over-caffeinated) and I know, you haven’t cured cancer (or Covid), fed the hungry or made a dent in inequality, or… But maybe, just maybe, you’ve put something out into the world that will at least briefly resonate with others or just vibrate among the stars, rattle the frequencies like a wind chime in a soft breeze. And even if that does not happen, you have pushed yourself forward, through failure or mediocrity or self-doubt, into a new artspace, a new launchpad, a new you. Even after the glow begins to fade and you’re off on the next adventure. And even if it wasn’t so amazing, remember the feeling it will come in handy, as a seed has been planted and the future beckons.
Why make an image that’s been seen before?
February 2024