I've always enjoyed words. Including the words "a picture is worth a thousand words." My work in edzart has been and is worth thousands of words. To me anyway. So, Buttons, be a tailor; mine are digital.
See Fragments, Volume One for some of my first 243 scratchings with light in the dark.
28 June 2009: Well I've shrugged and accepted that the work I've done in Eleanor's Gallery over the past few years belongs here in edzart. Soon I'll be comfortable being Eleanor again from time to time... or at least that's how it seems to be at the moment.
6 May 2009: The "Seems To Be" collection is expanding and I seem to be enjoying the work after a few months of quiet. Some of the work I'm producing has me wondering whether it might be time for me to let Eleanor fade into retirement... seems to be this could be the time. But maybe not.
25 April 2009: "seems to be" I am painting again...
10 April 2009: So I'm still thinking that in some moments I wish I could just do this all the time but still realize that if I did this all the time I would never meet the people, places and things from which this artwork springs and so there would quickly be nothing more. So I'll take a deep breath and continue to do this as often as I can in between other things... to resentments and back I guess.
13 September 2008: So I've been giving some thought to these "edzart" galleries and collections and to the work we do at Eleanor's Gallery. We've been doing this for about three and a half years now and don't really take much time to talk about it. It's a just "do it" kind of thing and the techniques we use seem to be a bit of a mystery.
A common question is "how does the artist do that?" A common comment is "that's not photoshop. you can't do that with photoshop." We tell people, truthfully, that its not photoshop nor corel nor some other similar thing. So now we tell people its a technique not a program.
The technique we use in our digital art does not just involve use of filters. It involves starting with a photograph or a piece of one and dancing with the pixels (or as it says at the top of this page, playing with light in the dark). Sometimes it takes dozens of steps to arrive at the image we'll use to create a digital painting. Some people say that a sculptor looks at a block of marble and sees the form within. His or her job then is to release the statue. When we started our digital artwork this is pretty much what we were doing.
From there, of course, many other paths have opened up. Models for photoshoots have spoken of the liberation and healing they experience in photoshoots which show the beauty and character from which they've become disconnected. Then when "paintings" are created from some of the photos there is a sense of personal magnificence.
The vast range of work in Eleanor's Gallery demonstrates the power of the artistic collaboration between model, photographer and artist. All of the photoshoots are "staged" in a significant sense - whether simple shoots or costumed or elaborate attempts to deal with pain, abuse and recovery.
A remarkable step forward happened when we walked through a cancer journey with an amazing woman who was facing a double mastectomy. The Irene Stroom work in Eleanor's Gallery took us to a new level, integrated our artistic techniques with our sense of purpose in our communities of pain. More recently we created a sequence, Sword of Truth which carried us in images and poetry through pain & abuse from childhood to sexual assault & betrayal as adults and then forward to a point of emotional and spiritual closure.
As we've expanded the range of our work we've had people come to us to say they want to deal with their sense of self and painful moments in their past. Some of these were natural and organic in the process between model, photographer and artist. Others required more "theatrical" set up almost to the point of creating "story boards" in photograhs.
Love, hate, pain, abuse, dysfunction and transcendence are much more difficult to recreate and face and survive than a simple rendering from model to artist. We've had some success with this and are finding ourselves drawn more and more to this aspect of walking the walk together in a healing process.
So now we takes some deep breaths and move forward to next stages of our work. We will continue to dance with the dark in search of the light: models, photographers and artists in unison on an important journey.
not just a
Eleanor's Gallery
