Digital Painting
I started to use digital painting techniques at about the same time I started seriously taking photographs in Berlin. Prior to that I’d used Photoshop and Painter to create and prepare images for book covers for the volumes published by my small poetry press, Burning Cities. But I didn’t see the creative potential in digital techniques until I realized that the photos captured by my camera’s eye did not reveal the world I’d seen through the lens. Then, as now, my goal is to make the scenes the camera captures better resemble the images I see in my mind and heart when I take them them.
Helping others perceive what I see more often starts with saturating the colors because, for me, colors are always hypersaturated. I have synesthesia, and so colors also have flavor, pitch, and emotional valance; of these, only emotional valance is accessible visually, and so I try to use color and composition to recreate those emotions in the viewer. Hypersaturation overwhelms some who view my work, but for me the world is a place of intense, often raucous convergences, where everything happens at once. I’m aware that’s not to everyone’s taste. I do occasionally create subtle pieces, but those are based on original photos in which most viewers see almost nothing, while I still see a broad range of colors.
If any of these catch you fancy, they can be produced as NFTs, prints, or printed on products like Collage.com’s wonderful sherpa photo blankets. Just contact me and I’ll be happy to talk about how you can become the owner of one of my pieces.