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Who, you might be wondering is this self styled Digital Modernist ? Well there is a summary in the "About" page, but here is some of the background.

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I cannot DO Art ! How do I know ? Well my Art teacher at school told me. That was aged 11.A lesson you never forget. Presumably he thought his job was to work only with those who were already artists ? Who knows ? Certainly not the student teacher who came in to do a lesson on "Pop Art". It fascinated me like none of the Classical Art the teacher had shown us week after week. Shame he had to spoil it by telling the student "Thank you - and now take that nonsense back to college and throw it in the bin !". Suffice to say that this man put me off Art for decades.

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I took up photography instead. I started the hard way, with chemicals in a dark room. That taught me a lot about light and how to control it. Once digital photography came along and I got into Photoshop, a whole new world opened up for me. I could use the digital tools to create Art - firstly realistic photographs, then manipulated photographs and then blank sheet images. I realised that Art was not about using a paintbrush, but was about expressing yourself.

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I started to look for inspiration from a wide range of Artworks. A pattern emerged. I could not relate to classical styles at all. They represented photography clubs with their competitions and rules and I had already understood that my desire to express myself would not be met by blindly following a set of someone else's rules. I wanted to express feelings and emotions, ideas and beliefs. I was not getting anything by simply recreating a copy of nature. Everything that I liked in Art in some way related to the Modernist period from the 1870s to the 1960s. At heart I was a Modernist

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What did it mean in terms of my creativity ? Well I now wanted to

break the rules. I wanted to express thoughts about what was

going on around me, not static snapshots. I felt strongly about

things and I wanted to somehow express my feelings. Most of

all I wanted to prove that Art teacher that he was WRONG.

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The first piece of Modernist Art that I did was a naive attempt to

create a sense of what it means to suffer from Bi-Polar, a mental

health issue that has plagued my daughter all of her adult life. I

later realised that I had produced an image in the style of an

Abstract Expressionist.

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It is now my Mission to encourage, and free, all the people who,

like me, were put off Art by a blinkered conservative so called

professional.

 

I am The Digital Modernist.