“Digital Ellipse” by Michael Garaway
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The images I produce are rooted in the visual and emotional experience of urban and industrial landscape, and have been refined over several years in order to deal with that experience in a coherent and consistent way. After working through various two-dimensional media and formats, I feel that the most successful treatments of this material take the form of mainly monochromatic drawings, using abstracted forms rendered in charcoal and conte crayon on tinted grounds.
Within the past two years this work has been supplemented with the use of microcomputer and paint software to prepare compositions and forms for drawings. Perspective or three-dimensional concerns rarely occur in my work, so that I find paint software well suited to manipulating its basic elements of geometrical form, marks and areas of tone. Changes to an image may be stored at intervals and printed out to give a comprehensive record, forming the basis for drawings in “traditional” media.
Close reference in this manner to dot-matrix print-out has resulted in drawing like “Digital Ellipse”, interpreting relatively crude images according to my developed style. Some features, such as rows of repeated letter forms, are imitated by hand printing conte crayon onto the drawing surface, while other features are treated with more freedom as areas of marks or tones. The computer preparations leading to “Digital Ellipse” also informed work such as “Drizzle Base”, their relatedness being fairly obvious.
My computer experience, all be it with relatively unsophisticated machines and software, has enhanced my work, enabling existing ideas to be quickly assessed and changed, and providing stimulus for new directions to be taken. Consideration of the relationships between the types of images I work with, whether by electronic or traditional means, is of major importance in this continuing process.
