James Faure Walker: Figures in a Landscape

 
  • ©,

Artist(s):


Title:


    Figures in a Landscape

Exhibition:


Creation Year:


    2002

Medium:


    Giclée iris print

Size:


    32 in x 36 in

Category:


Keywords:


Artist Statement:


    Lately, I have been thinking more and more about drawing, and some of these ideas are becoming part of the work I make. I draw the same motif (a tree, a chair) switching between a brush and a Wacom tablet, and play around with the differences. For someone like me, who has both a painting studio and a digital studio, drawing with line is one of the options that bridge the gap between media. I still don’t know the right term to use, because though I usually end up with a giclée iris print, I do not feel I am a digital printmaker, a computer artist, or a digital painter. If I identify this work as “drawing,” and my larger paintings, which use similar techniques, as “drawn paintings,” then I am getting closer. What excites me is the continuing convergence between painting, photography, and the digital. The processes, techniques, and, of course, software can be so rich and surprising I sometimes feel like standing back and letting the pictures make themselves without any interference from me.

    I have been using prefabricated components, sections of cardboard that I paint and build into temporary constructions before photographing. When I reassemble these drawings, which are overlaid with digital drawing, I may introduce quite arbitrarily an unrelated photo, a street scene. This may hold the attention and subordinate the rest of the picture, but it can also lift the mood of a picture and activate latent contrasts.

    Figures in a Landscape is the title of a picture that used a much larger (12 feet x 10 feet) initial study as a ground, which consisted of motifs developed from small doodles, derived from an evening spent at a flower-arranging demonstration (I was the only male there, but got through my embarrassment by realising the dandified geometry/botany had possibilities for the digital artist). I tried several ways to resolve this in its digital stage, but one night I recalled that I never quite made proper use of one of the hundreds of photos I had recently taken in Japan. The couples with the umbrella are in Kyoto, and there could be some small affinity between the wetness of the paint and the rain.

Affiliation Where Artwork Was Created:


    Kingston University