Beauty

"Beauty created by God is nature. Beauty created by man is art." -Immanuel Kant, 1790 A strong aspect of my of my work is "finding beautiful." This discovery process has become a driving force of my art making.  I am once again rearranging studio  spaces, and have been reorganizing my art. Much of it was from my undergrad days, and it's been fun to revisit some of these oldies. I looked for beauty in landscapes, beauty in people, in portraiture, in faces. Looking at my early paintings in particular, I can see happiness in my brush strokes. One my instructors once told me that. He said he could tell from my paintings that I was happy. At the time, I didn't know what he meant. I looked at my paintings and saw my frustration with an ellipse, my struggles with perspective, my uneasy attempts at a natural sense of space. I see it now though. I see the brushstrokes as works of joy.

I search for the beautiful has continued. I look for beauty that is beyond a visual aesthetic, more than what lies on the surface. I use the visual aesthetic as a means to represent powerful feelings of passion and wonder and other unnamed emotions. These feelings and desires are part of what makes us alive. And life is a beautiful thing.

Digital Painting

I work in mostly digital mediums right now. Let's face it--since I have the software kicking around anyways, it's much cheeper. This was done in Photoshop with my pen tablet. It's more than economics though. It offers so many possibilities, especially when I am looking to combing photography and painting. My photographs are already digital, so if I can include successful painterly aspects before the image is matured to a hard copy state, the blend of mediums will be more thorough.

Thought I would put some of my traditional skills to the test and do a digital painting from life. Hence, the above image. This was done by looking at my actual feet, not  photograph. My strong traditional background makes me distinguish between the two. This is a study and it's not perfect. I did it in about 35 minutes, I would guess, and it was fun. No, it does not replace paint. But I think it is not so much inferior to paint either. I see digital fine art becoming a more respectable medium in the near future as more artists turn to it. Artists are by their nature innovators, and they search for new and inspiring things. Perhaps I'm speaking more for myself, but I think a new medium begs to be pushed and explored. It's potencial still has yet to be fully realized. Commercial artists see this already, and it's really only a matter of time. I'm sure many fine art circles already respect it, but I think there is a more old school pool of thought that dismisses digital completely. I guess that is their loss. Just as photography took time to be recognized as fine art and before that, print making, this media will take time to be fully accepted.