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.
The Technique of Ink CollageAlthough 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.
A more detailed explanation appears in my 2007 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" and from the 2009 article in the International Journal of Arts and Technology, Vol. 2, Nos. 1/2 2009 "Up close and personal: some effects of technology on portraiture" published by Inderscience Publishers website: www.inderscience.com.
Blake Hurt
Charlottesville, Virginia