Backstage
Menu
Curtis Hendricks

DamnPhotoArtist

Photo Art* & Small Literature**
* Computer-based art that uses a photograph as a base
** Short Prose

Scroll down to find recent works

The Proliferation of Photo Art

4/12/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
This tutorial (I’m linking to it here) just fascinates the hell out of me. Not the process that Adobe is highlighting in it’s Create e-magazine (a GREAT e-magazine, by the way, which I highly recommend subscribing to) But that the art form it’s promoting is one I’ve been using for two decades. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re doing so – photo art as we know it today would not exist without their product. I’m just realizing that I haven’t noticed Adobe doing much to promote it before. I could be wrong – I’ve been wrong already several times today. I could have missed it, or simply not been as attune to it as I’ve become.

Likely I’m reacting this way because It’s easy to feel alone, practicing the art I practice, when so few others – here, anyway – are doing it, and so many artist communities are resentful of computer-based art. Promotions and tutorials like this both help legitimize the art form and support the artists who do it.

That said …

First, the technique as illustrated requires downloading an additional set of tools for Photoshop, and it’s using A LOT of tools – the technique probably could be accomplished without this download if one is intimately in tune with Photoshop, but the download ties everything together into a neat package. Even so, the video tutorial sort of starts at the end and tries to go back and illustrate how everything works – I couldn’t tell from watching how the heck fire they got there, which, to me, is the bigger question (I’d likely understand it better if I downloaded the package and tried it out). They’re also using something I don’t, which are the brush tools, together with masking, to draw into the image – the instructor states that’s best done on a tablet. I admit it – it’s a bit of artistry beyond my skill set, or at least one I haven’t bothered to pick up. The final work involves not just layers but GROUPS of layers – DOZENS of them and using different blend methods besides. It is astonishingly complex and lays testament to the incalculable depth of the software. One could spend ten hours a day, six days a week, for five years working with Photoshop and still not know all it’s capable of. I watched the tutorial and felt totally inadequate afterwards. My work is so simplistic by comparison; even my most complex works only just scratch the surface of the software’s capabilities.

But in the end … IT’S STILL JUST A WATERCOLOR FILTER!! I’ve said this before, specifically (I’d have to go back and find the exact blog), one can’t just apply a watercolor filter and say they’ve accomplished something. Art is created by the combination of perspectives into a new visual paradigm, not just taking a picture and making it pretty, which is essentially, for all its complexity, what the tutorial is doing.

I have to admit, I watched this tutorial and thought, “I call myself an artist? I suck! I worse than suck! I’m such an amateur! I have so much to learn!”

Still, I must remind myself it is one thing to have technical mastery, and another to have artistic vision. To evoke emotion, passion, and art. Creating from the heart and the gut, rather than the brain. Van Gogh vs. DaVinci. Do I still have both my ears?

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Curtis Hendricks

    All my life I have had to learn to do things differently. To see the world differently.

    Art attracted me from the beginning. Almost every home in the tiny farming village where I grew up had DaVinci’s ‘Last Supper’ on the wall. I would come across modern abstract art in magazines and be absolutely fascinated by the colors and techniques.

    But there were no artists in my village. No one understood what modern art was. Or why it was. But there was an appreciation for photography.

    I began shooting with a 1960 model Agfa rangefinder fixed-lens 35mm camera and learned to use darkroom techniques to finish my work. Graduating to a single lens reflex camera I worked primarily with Kodachrome. Digital photography opened a new world. The computer became the artboard I never had; the darkroom I could never afford. I discovered there would never be a camera or a lens that could capture what I saw in my head – that, I had to learn to create on my own.

    I use the photograph the same way a painter uses a charcoal sketch – as a starting place. I squeeze out the unseen hiding between the pixels; the angels, the demons of my own imagination.

    ​Light. Color. Darkness. Perspective. Introversion. Mystery. Love.

    Archives

    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Commune
  • Consider
  • Collect
  • Communicate
  • Commune
  • Consider
  • Collect
  • Communicate