StrangeScapes

StrangeScapes is an ongoing series of digital assemblages where hand painted elements from my many real world paintings are digitally taken apart, and are mixed with pieces that typically don’t belong together – digitally embellished and reassembled into whimsical clusters of mutated landscapes, strange beasties, candy trails, constellations, faux fungi and other absurdities. The resultant hybrids of these real world artworks and their virtual avatars are layered, rich, and  their merging more dramatic than the original pieces of art they were born from.

In my real world art, I allow for organic destiny and follow the lead of the fluid paint layers, using it as guide to build a flourish of biomorphic forms. However, creating the composites in StrangeScapes involves a more intentional breaking of existing structures and reassembling of them into newer, denser, chaordic, hybrid forms with a mind of their own.

Resisting the urge to over edit and paint over the collage in digital format, these StrangeScapes hold echoes of their old selves created in traditional media, revealing the grain of the canvas, the crest and troughs in the lines drawn by a pen running on an uneven surface, misplaced paint splatters and the wee off-kilterness of the human hand, adding to the narrative of the work.

This series is a continuation of the Alien Landscapes series and an exploration to transcend  my current work process and choice of media. In its most basic form, these artworks exist as static digital assemblages, that can be reprinted and hand embellished to create unique physical iterations of each artwork. While other works in the series are animated for new media art displays.

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