About My Work

My work falls into two main categories. It can all be described as "lens-based" (as opposed to computer generated) digital art, but some I regard as a form of "painting by other means" using fragments of photographic images instead of paint, while some falls more squarely within the traditions of photomontage (made seamless by digital imaging technology).

"Painting by Other Means"

Most of the time, to me it feels like painting. My canvas is a screen, and instead of making marks with paint, I use a mouse to apply and blend elements of photographs I have taken specifically for that purpose - often too small to be visible to the naked eye. Very occasionally it is just a single photograph, rigorously worked on to achieve a particular result. But most of my work incorporates many hundreds (some over a thousand) layers of photographic fragments seamlessly merged into a single, very high resolution image which can be printed to virtually any size on almost any material. On canvas they look like paintings, and photographs, or both, or neither. Mounted on boxes of different depths, assembled together and hung on a wall, they look like huge painted sculptures. This really is, I believe, a genuinely new art form that transcends the boundaries between traditional means of creating visual art.

I find the process of creating abstract forms that appear to be composed of elements of  reality endlessly fascinating, utterly compelling, and still quite astonishing. I also love patterns, with their diverse and contradictory meanings – from the child-like visual pleasures of the kaleidoscope and "mere" surface design ("that is just a pattern"), to their profound significance in science, music and mathematics, their association with "deeper" forms of knowledge, as aids to meditation (the mandala), and as the unifying intermediary between the material and the spiritual world in traditional Islamic design.

Digital Photomontage

At other times it is more like cutting out pieces of photographs with the most amazing pair of scissors you can imagine and then seamlessly stitching them together. My 3-dimensional reliefs belong in this category.

This is plainly photography, but I am actually more influenced here by traditions within cinematography than photography itself. In both the first question is where to put the camera, but in cinematography, and in my kind of photomontage, these decisions depend on how the various shots are later to be combined (though you often don’t know that at the time). I take hundreds of photographs from different positions, extract from these the elements I wish to use (often barely visible to the naked eye) and these become my raw materials. The process of stitching them all seamlessly together is, to me, a bit like editing a film – only possibly even more time-consuming.

The way I approach this reflects an interest in combining different planes, perspectives and angles of vision in ways that have some affinities with cubism and futurism. I have also been influenced by my studies of scene dissection, point-of-view narration and editing techniques in classical and post-classical cinema. The two come together in the ways I "play" with the implied position of the viewer in these 3-D pieces, knowing that the final piece will look very different depending on where you are standing.

Here the shifting perspectives and implied positions of the viewer ‘within the scene’ interact with those of the actual viewer of the piece as a whole (i.e. you), particularly when they are also literally ‘shifting’ from one relative position to another. Ask yourself the question "who is looking at what and from where".and the answers will be complicated and often paradoxical.