25th May 2007
Abstract
Old Masters and the New Technology
The composition virtues of such artists as Rembrant, Casper David Friedrich, Rubens, Watteau and Turner were born of their times. Before photography enabled us to manufacture them, images could only be made. Such things as the vista, chiaroscuro, complexity vs unity, the warm/cool divide and the spatial gradient were all given meticulous and beautifully crafted attention.
When photography appeared it locked the artist out of the image-making process and for years they were obliged to take second place to it’s glossy objectevity. Then with the development of the new technologies the photograph became editable and artists were once again let back into the creative loop. In recent cinema and games releases we are now seeing a whole range of images whose cultural DNA is rooted in the history of painting. It is my intension to demonstrate some of these old master pictorial devices and show their practical application within the digital composite. I will be using Photoshop to do this.