Alan Falk Alan Falk
My computer work grew directly from my vocation as a painter and printmaker working in traditional media and my occupation as a graphic designer where I became familiar with the tools and applications I have adapted to my "fine art" computer images.
The works are "collages" of images either scanned or drawn. Except for rare instances any scans I do use are from subjects I have photographed myself - figures, seascapes, objects etc., and always scanned in black & white. In this way I feel I keep the integrity of the work in terms of "painting" and personal vision, thinking of scans and other inputs I use (such as line art and images created on various applications) as the initial drawing phase.
The images I use are often manipulated and rearranged beyond recognition - for example in "Phlebus the Phoenician," all the figures (except the infant) are derived from the same model.
The computer has offered me an opportunity to expand many of my ideas and imagination and to create images that would have been difficult in paint.
The choice of subject matter and the almost Baroque style I use were conscious decisions, a deliberate challenge to the normal concept associated with "computer-art" i.e. the metallic, slick, hard edge look. In this way the work is almost a contradiction, a highly personal poetic vision created with impersonal high tech equipment.
So while I consider the work on one hand to be quite conceptual in nature, I believe it is at the same time extremely personal, and through the use of literary and mythological subject matter and the opportunity that this digital media offers, I have found a new way of expressing my visual ideas.
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