Source Materials: 02
Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 5:43PM BEFORE
AFTER
Featured in this post is the first image I ever scanned. It was a contact print of a plate of mangos I had shot with an old Rollieflex several years before. If I had known better, I would have started with a less complex project. "Mangos", as it turned out, would occupy me on and off for the next year.
When it was finished, my low resolution CRT screen and low resolution 8.5"x11" Apple inkjet printer provided only enough feedback for me to know that the image had promise. Shortly thereafter, with no better options, I had an small Iris print of "Mangos" struck for an exhibition at the Art Museum of South Texas. (Today that print is included in the museum's permanent collection.) A year later I acquired a higher resolution, 6-color Epson, 13 inches wide, and a couple years later an Epson printing 17 inches wide. In 2006 came the 24 inch, 8-color Epson. Finally, I could print what I wanted when I wanted at a price I could afford.
All along the way, with higher resolutions and larger image sizes, I would reprint "Mangos" and it would reveal more detail (or lack of it), and I would respond by applying more detail and polish. Today "Mangos" weighs in at 200 megabytes and 27x20 inches. It began its life on a Mac Quadra 840AV, stored on a 1 gigabyte hard drive and now resides on a 1 terabyte drive attached to my Intel iMac. Over the years, it has been manipulated with a mouse, then a trackball, and finally with a stylus and Wacom tablet. I have generated more proof prints of it than I care to estimate. As a work of art and as an artist, I can truly say that "Mangos" and I have grown up together. The print itself could serve as a map of the past ten years of my creative life, each pixel, every shift in color, charting a course into unknown territory on an expedition that I have had the very good fortune to participate in - and have yet to complete.
Reader Comments (1)
We're shopping for a photo printer, stopped by Penny Prints to see if you'd commented on yours - really enjoy looking at your work and reading your posts, thanks for putting them up.
Hope all is well -
Chris & Ian