Drowning In Opacity

Working digitally in Photoshop, I use montages of photographs constantly sampled and re-sampled. Layers of opacity open me to allowing chance elements to conspire together with the subconscious to bring the characters and places to life. Originally an oil and portrait painter I discovered that digital techniques could enable a more fluid and dynamic relationship between myself and my art. Combined with discovering photographic techniques used by early criminologists, I have spent the last couple of years refining and building my digital techniques. I also re-synthesis digital with analogue by combining prints with oils and other media.

The Alice series, Memory & Muchness, began with a photograph taken at Kentwell of a rough board used to block a window in an old camera obscura. With time, the board had become decayed and overgrown and the glass it pressed against covered in a patina of dirt and grime. This became the unifying visual theme of the main images in the series-the cloying twisting undergrowth that surrounds the figures. Overlaid and rotated its patterns change and enclose them. It pays a silent homage to that very special dark place at Kentwell where an image of the outside world would appear on the wall as if by magic, and the techniques of artists long gone that pointed their way to my primary physical source of images-photographs.

The figures themselves are created with dozens upon dozens of small pieces of photographs, Overlaid and distorted and merged together through manipulating their opacity, just as the Victorian pioneer, Sir Francis Galton did with his experiments in overlaying photographs of criminals in an attempt to try and uncover a common 'criminal type'. Each piece needs careful adjustment to blend into each other, and finding the critical point where a new face emerges from the old fragments is both an act of judgment and discovery. Understandably I now find myself taking a lot of photographs, hunting for pictures that I can break down and reconstruct in new and exciting ways. The digital nature of the images I create allows me to use fragments of them repeatedly in different pieces of art, or to print them out and use them as montage elements on wooden boards, canvas or paper. I have also been creating mirrors with the backing eroded away to reveal faces of the characters in the series-faces that look out at the viewer to merge with their own in keeping with my digital technique. I can then fall back on my experience painting in oils and other paint media to conjure up entirely new and unique pieces. Some of these I might then scan back into my computer to keep the cycle of reintegration and re sampling going like a creative spiral, a labyrinth of inspiration that takes me to undiscovered ideas and pictures.