About my Digital Graphic work...
Some of the images here are engineered from the ground up in Photoshop, sometimes utilizing borrowed images, many are my own photography.
Regarding the recent psychedelic series... Background:
I make these wild looking YouTube music videos utilizing composited and layered images from old films and videos. When making them, I bring together imagery from a wide variety of sources that I then heavily manipulate to my artistic satisfaction as to make them nearly unrecognizable from their original state. Below is a link to them on YouTube!
As an artist from Chicago, I have been influenced by my fellow SAIC alumni Ed Paschke (who I deeply venerate) and keep in mind when I make these visual concoctions. I first started making videos like this from the time I was a “VJ” at a notorious Chicago night club “Medusa” for play in their video room the mid-80’s. With no digital technology back then-I used slide projectors, random 8mm films (that I got from 2nd hand stores) which I then “mistreated” chemically and often scratched up to create“glitch-y” textures over the top of projected videos that I previously edited together with scenes from both old and new-ish films. At the time I had no conceivable way to document those early works.
This home-brewed layering technique I developed yielded some very entrancing images. Fast forward to now: I have worked out that I could siphon off still-frame captures from my current work that look captivating in my view. This imagery goes by so fast in video form, many images are only on screen for a few frames. Some of them are haunting and rather evocative. I find these fleeting images just as artistic as if I painted them! My painterly aesthetic remains in play regardless of whether it is serving a "moving" image, or I am painting it by hand from preliminary drawings.
