Digital art

I am a digital artist who uses his own photo’s to create all sorts of graphics, be it photo-illustrations (compositing) or digital illustrations. But I also start to use my photos like they are (after some post-processing). Categorization is still kinda difficult I would say, but we will get there at some point.

Talking about the birds

There is this thing about birds, that if they are used to symbolize humans in a composition/painting/collage – we do accept them as humans, there is nothing alien about them, no uncanny valley stuff at all. And at the same time they mostly do not really bring their own character- or so I think.

I have the impression that if I were to use other animals then we have more of an idea of what that animal symbolizes. Insects are NOT human, they are a danger and mammals are surrounded by the stories we heard about them in our childhoods or what they mean for us as food or their economic meaning or as pets. They immediately have character, or symbolize something.

At first I have used humans made from 3D puppets in my artworks, but even though I still like those works, it was also too flat. I have also made works with pictures of real humans and tried to use their stories in my artworks but then it became too personal for a couple of them and therefore I stopped having permission to use these compositions in exhibitions or for sale.

Birds have no baggage, they are not us – some say they are not even real – they are beautiful reptiles with wings. This makes them ideal to use as characters in my future compositions because we can somehow identify or bond with them or ascribe them human qualities, emotions or so – but they are also not us, they are neutral. I could also use reptiles, I think, but I have more pictures with birds in them.

Work in progress: Nature meets City I (2020-2021?)

This is growing into a new series: nature meets city – part cityscape part landscape.  Made a lot of cityscapes over the year and I started to notice two things that interested me the most. If I was working from a tower or so, those are mostly in the middle of the city – or what used to be an important point, like a harbor. And I had the tendency to zoom in on edge of the towns, its borders in the landscapes. Or, when standing outside of a city on a high place, I tended to focus on the borders from the other direction – or focus on patches of nature in the cities.

I know we can hardly call it nature with the anthropocene and all, but still.

Pictures taken in Hamburg and Berlin.

Flowers, plants

It is completely unintentional, but these images remind me of old school books with plants, herbaria  and such. Or is it herbariums? Ah, the curse of a classical education, always overthinking. Yes, I am old. No, I am not going to apologize for it!

Spots of light – or: Honey, I broke my lens

… or actually: I took apart my lens on purpose to see what would happen if I changed things. The end goal is to find a combination of parts that give the impression of what I see when I take off my glasses. The world without my glasses changes into a painting with moving parts and strange lights that are alive. This is not necessarily an impressionist painting, but very often it is. This can also be more cubist (Braque) or Surrealist (Ernst) because the brain has to find its own creative ways to make sens of the input. I am sometimes annoyed that photos are too clear, too precise, too sharp, too mechanical. Maybe that is why I like small sensor cameras like my beloved TZ81 and the LX7 that was stolen from me.

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