About me

I began my artistic life as a photographer with a Brownie camera, given to me by my parents when I was a small child. My parents were avid photographers and introduced me to darkroom work at an early age. As an adult I continued exploring photography, taking annual photo trips with my mother. I started altering photos with Polaroid image transfers and SX-70 emulsion manipulation. When the first desktop color inkjet printers became available, I started using Adobe Photoshop to scan and alter slides and negatives and print them at home. I joined an online printing group and learned how to use alternate inks and papers, and how to color calibrate. When the first consumer digital cameras came out, I got a Kodak dc4800 and set up my tabletop studio, where I created imaginary scenes using objects from the garden or kitchen, strobes for dramatic lighting and silvered wrapping paper to optically create warped and unreal scenes. I bought the first digital SLR and continued to focus on images altered both optically (through warped reflections) and digitally (using Photoshop). Later, with the ability to create high-resolution artwork on the iPad, I started using a variety of apps, first focused on altering and combining photos but later doing digital drawing and painting as well as digital collage from digitally made collage papers. To understand better how to paint digitally, I embarked on a series of traditional media drawing and painting classes, as well as classes in collage and monotype printing. Today I work both with traditional media such as paints and papers as well as wholly digital works. My work tends to fall between the cracks of commonly understood categories, but I have found many inspirational artists from whom I have learned so much. My subject tends to be distorted portraits or figures but I also create abstract and surreal images of various kinds.

Many of my images begin life as photographs, either my own, or my late mother's, or images available on the web for free unlimited use. I use these images as starting points, or ingredients, in the creation of my artwork. Rather than depict reality, my aim is to create an imaginary or surreal quality to my final images. There is an element of fantasy about them. To get there, I transform my images using a variety of iPad apps. Using the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, I am able to create images in which the original ingredients are all but unrecognizable.

I restrict and modify the color palette to emphasize mood, create mystery and reveal the personality of the subject. To further simplify a visually complex image I may remove color almost entirely, leaving only muted tones. I may simplify shapes, flatten or smooth, or place parts of the image in shadows, using light to draw the eye to key elements.

I create imaginary worlds. Blur and glow give a dream-like quality. I stretch, shrink, warp, and push pixels around to create a distorted reality. I overlay images with variations of themselves or with other images for a unique or otherworldly effect. I experiment to create unreal scenes or objects. Some images hint at a hidden depth behind a face or object.

I owe a huge debt to the iColorama Facebook group, from whose members I have learned so much, and by whose work I continue to be inspired.