“Banana Dress” by James Faure Walker
Title:
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
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James Faure Walker
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- University of the Arts
Symposium:
Artist Statement:
I stumbled into the world of computer graphics some six months ago. I was doing some type-setting for a student exhibition while teaching at St Martin’s and found myself in the computer graphics department. I was soon playing around with Paint programmes, amazed by their speed and agility. Here at last was a means of drawing in light. colour and shape simultaneously – a beautiful demonstration of Klee’s concept of line as a point in motion. The department was very helpful. and when I said what a marvellous doodling box it would be to have in the corner of my studio they lent me an Apple II plus inkjet printer over the vacation.
An idiosyncrasy of this machine was that the colours printed were quite different to those on screen -not just the usual discrepancy- so that reds always came out as green, and so on. Once I had figured this out, I set about composing colour ideas in quite alien keys to get the required printed colours, and of course these doctored colour schemes proved more interesting. I mention this because a computer can nudge your intuitive responses, make you think laterally and maybe more creatively – you can visualize so many more treatments, all with instant finger-tip control.
Since then I have graduated to an Amiga 500 with a Xerox 4020 inkjet printer, a much more refined set-up. The challenge, I now find, is to upgrade my paintings with this new alertness, this freedom. this sense of can-do.
