Artist's Statement

People have a special mental facility for recognizing faces. We can see them in clouds, the sides of mountains, or the moon. Along with this recognition, we also look for meaning in them; for some clue of experience or intention. Using the technique of filtering an image of a face through line drawings, a technique I call 'ink collage', I have taken advantage of the new digital opportunities to manipulate drawings and color in great detail so that the result is a palimpsest of meanings that are discovered by physically approaching the works. You see more about the person's history when physically close to the pictures and more about their appearance when stepping away; this seems an appropriate metaphor for how we see people in general.

Although this is mostly a digital technique, involving a family of original software programs, the concept is to use a series of drawings as metaphorical wire frames along with an underlying color picture. These dark lines of the drawing are combined, one on top of another, to form an irregular mosaic of openings. It is as if you looked at a colored carpet through a tangle of wire coat hangers. Through these openings, the colors from an underlying image are digitally "squeezed" so that you get the original color image as it is pushed through the mosaic-like openings. You thus have the chance to combine a number of drawings while maintaining the image underneath.

It is an irony of the process that seeing the picture in its entirety requires that it be physically printed since computer screens are too small in their resolution to show the full image. So, like a blind optician, you can use the computer to make the image, but it cannot be used to see it.

Haunting these digital works is the role of using a computer to make art, which, until recently, has been a more hands-on process. But one way to view the history of western art techniques is to think of it as a march toward increasing the control, precision and speed of artists in realizing their vision. From finger painting, to fresco, to oil, watercolor and acrylic, artists would like to shorten the time between concept and execution. The arrival of the computer and its associated technology follows this tradition. By thinking of the computer as an agent, in keeping with the work of the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt whose artwork was a series of instructions for others to follow, the computer is just a tireless implementer of detail and variation specified by the artist. The results are unavailable with other methods and significantly broaden the range of possible artistic expression.

A more detailed explanation appears in my paper from The Fifth International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing (C5): "More Than A Pencil:Using the Computer to Make Two-Dimensional Art"

Blake Hurt
Charlottesville, Virginia