Reality Is All In The Mind: A Relationship Between Collage And Photo Edits

When I work in paint, collage, or any other fine art medium, I'm very aware of the stages I go through from concept to finished product.  Personally, I usually start with a vision of the composition of a whole, even if I'm working section by section and letting the piece develop into itself without a fixed concept.  That way, I can work out the lights and darks, and the placement of shapes and their relationships to one another.  Here are a couple of examples of collage where I did just that.

Both this piece and the piece of collage below were created for Revel In The Moment.  In this first piece, I was more concerned with the placement of the shapes of the paper pieces, the balance of lights and darks, and they way the colors harmonized more than the theme.  When I started out, I knew I wanted to combine a black and white image or two and a variety of some interesting textures in an analogous color scheme.  I chose to work with green/blue/purple and purple's compliment of yellow.  Mostly this was done without thinking about it, or consciously considering more than what was pleasing when placed side by side or juxtaposed.

This piece was begun with two thoughts in mind:  The use of two moons, and the layering of pattern and color.  My eye was drawn to another analogous set of colors, yellow/orange/green/blue, all with similar values, so the black and white provided the high contrast necessary to deliniate the moons as focal images as opposed to just another set of items stuck onto the page.  In this piece more than the one on top, imagination needed to be moved from its abstract mental image to an image of an imaginative reality before I could translate it to the page.  The two moons are a central theme in Haruki Murakami's book1Q84 which I am currently reading, and I created an abstract thought of using them creatively in collage.  Because two moons do not exist in the reality of our world, I could not go out and draw them from life, or re-create them from a memory of real life.  I had to create a reality for them in my imagination, visualize that reality and really see it in my mind's eye, before I could begin to work to translate my imagined reality to the page.  In the end, I chose to use dual stamped images of the moon rather than drawing new moons, as a contrast to the drawn look of the handwritten script already on the page.

It occurred to me that the way I filter what I see in an imagined image is very similar to the way the eye filters an image in reality.  Some things are brought to the forefront while others recede to the background or blur in the periphery.  And it got me thinking about relationships between the way I work with collage and the way I work with digital images.

I'm really interested in the way other artists photograph their work and the way websites in general display photos.  Personally, although au courant web consultants will tell you to pull a thousand and one arty tricks from your sleeve and display them all in the same six ways, I still prefer the straight forward gallery approach to photographing and displaying my work on the web, with clear, reality based color and content.  But I'm a fad-hater.  And I've noticed that from one generation to the next, what becomes very popular today, even if it's lovely and in good taste, will often be picked up by so many copycats that it loses its appeal, and often its meaning, as well.  Much like worn out records overplayed by disc jockeys from playlists limited to the 15 top rated songs.  

I've also spent a lot of years observing consultants and advisors run companies into the ground by forcing the latest and the greatest out of the box trends and techniques on management in order to get the desired response from the paranoid stockholders who hire them, and who know and care very little about anything other than nervously holding on to their purses.  And I've watched this backfire, over and over and over and over again.  So while I prefer a realistic gallery of portraits of my work on the web, keep in mind that my work on the web is often far from a collection of portraits of realism.  I like portray the items from my imagination as I've created them, in realistic pics on the web.

 I am in no way an ace photographer and I ask for help quite often from my professional photographer friends.  But I  have acquired a pretty awesome set of Photoshop skills over the years.  I've written some powerful Photoshop actions, and I've developed some special brushes, blends, and filters of my own.  I thank lynda.com tutorials for some of this knowledge, but when it comes right down to it, a few pieces of sage advice, some drawing skill, and a working knowledge of vector drawing programs like Adobe illustrator have been the key combination for my sucess with photo edits.  Sometimes these skills are used to make a poorly shot photo look more like the real article being photographed.  Other times, they're used for digital imaging and digital collage.  In either case, there is an indespensable skill set to be acquired.

Topping the list of skills that are worth taking the time to master, first and foremost, is gaining a working knowledge of the host of selection tools, pracitce, and mastering the art of selection in as short a time as possible.  The truth of truths is:  The more acucrate your selections, the better everything turns out, every time.  

Also on the success list is mastery of:

• A good sense of color identification and color matching

• A good sense of light and value 

• Seeing accurately, and developing your eye so that you are able to see what's really there, by overriding the eye's natural filters.  Being able to quickly tell the difference between what your eye tells you--what it wants you to think you see--as opposed to what's really there, is key

• Reality matching 

If good selections top the list, then achieving reality by matching reality is the skill that combines and unites them all.  If you have this skill, then you'll always be able to move into an artistic direction with filters and color changes, and also with collage, painting, and fine art and photography in general.  

You may think that reality and imagination are at opposite ends of the pole, but paradoxically, you can't use the images that your imagination wants to create until you've mastered reality.  Imagination and reality are not polar opposites, they are two sides of the same coin, and the coin doesn't exist with only one side.  If imagination is a vision of the destination, then reality is the vehicle that gets you there.  Reality takes you to the place your imagination envisions, because once you have a vision, you have to execute that vision from the reality of the material your imagination has conjured.  You can do this only if you have mastered reality matching.  You need to be able to visualize the dream of your imagination, capture the reality of that imaginary image, match it in your consciousness, and then replicate it.  Whether your canvas is digital or on your easel,  the reality of your imagination must be captured and translated onto your chosen substrate to move from concept to artistic reality.  

And vise-versa.  While I employ reality matching from imagination to collage, I employ the same principals in reverse when I shoot a photo of my work that doesn't look like the piece in reality.  I take the photo backwards from its unreality, photoshopping it back into what it looks like in real life so that I can display as accurate an image as possible on the web.  And indespensable skill when you shoot with a cheap camera, lack basic photography skills, or both.

Comments

[Joanne Thieme Huffman]

I always enjoy reading your take on art and it's place in life.