Whenever I share my art with folks two issues are bound to arise. First is the comment - “Wow, you really like color, don’t you?” Yes. Color makes me happy, and you can never have too much happiness. The second comment often takes a little longer to arrive, but eventually shows up - “What do you call these . . . pictures?”
That one is a little harder to answer. I have always doodled. I remember, probably around preschool age, using the little pencils on the back of the church pews to draw lines between the letters in the Sunday morning programs - trying to get a line from the top of the pages to the bottom, keeping the line as straight as I could while dodging the letters. Then, starting in junior high when you had your own notebook, all the way through graduate school my notes from lectures were always interspersed with doodles.
Have you seen images of DaVinci’s notebooks? Well, mine looked nothing like those. You see, I cannot draw. I mean representational, “looks like that,” kind of drawing. Faces, hands, bodies, dogs, flowers, cicadas, all that stuff. Just could never do it. My parents did get a tutor to give me drawing lessons when we lived in Europe. She was sweet, I remained incompetent. I have had friends who are quite skilled in this area - I mean professional artists whose work is sold in real galleries in big cities. I have sold my art, but not representational stuff. More like doodles on steroids. Again, fun, colorful, happy, stuff.
The question then occasionally expands to “Well, who influenced your work?” Nobody. I really love the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church and that crowd. Of course, Andrew Wyeth, and the old masters. But since I can’t draw, they don’t “influence” me in the sense of trying to emulate their style - worlds beyond my skill set.
However, I have also always loved, and taught, visual composition in both still photography and video. Hence, it is not surprising that I have finally arrived at an artistic style that I have decided to call L’Image Aumentare. (OK, in ordinary English - augmented images. Yech. Smacks of plastic surgery.) It sounds sooo much more artsy in Italian. (You can Google “How do you say augment in Italian?” for the “proper” pronunciation.) Go ahead. Give it a try in your best faux Italian accent. French works too. Cool, eh? So what are pictures done in the L’Image Aumentare style? Let me explain.
I’m going to use illustrations from a piece I am working on now. It is not completed, so it is too soon to say whether I like it or not, but I have all the steps in easy reach so I’ll go with it.
As the name implies each work in L’Image Aumentare begins with an image. In this case the picture is of an Indian Shot, a member of the calla lily family. I took the photo in the garden of a restaurant in White Pigeon, Michigan, close to Klinger Lake. I sometimes take a photo with an eye towards turning it into an image aumentare, other times I just scroll through my photos files and pull out one that catches my eye. I have a lot of flower pix and this one caught my eye - I think it was the “redness” of it.
Anyhow, step one is to load the image into photoshop, add a layer, and outline the pertinent portions in black. Then you delete the layer that has the actual photo, leaving you with this black and white “cartoon” of the original image, like this:
Next, I take a copy of the cartoon over to Staples and have them print out a copy in the size I want for the final image. In this case 16x20 inches. So I have a big version of the cartoon pictured above.
The next step is to draw designs in black in the “empty” spaces in the cartoon. These just sort of suggest themselves. It is important to make the lines of the designs as clear as possible, and to let them dry - at least a few hours, preferably overnight. This lets the black ink soak into the paper and, in essence, create little dams around each part of the design that will prevent the colors - which is drawn in next - from bleeding into neighboring portions of the design.
And that, of course, is the final step in an l’image aumentare, adding the colors which makes the image pop. I’m going to include a couple shots of the current “in progress” image here, and then close this post with a few finished images to give you a better idea of the result of the process.
This is a detail of the image that shows part of the image with the design/dams and the colors which have been added within the dams. The smaller design elements are about a quarter of an inch across. I don’t know why I do that to myself. 5X reading glasses help. I know when to stop for the day, when I start to cross the lines!
This a quick shot of the current state of the image. I try not to think about how much more there is to do. Just take it an inch at a time. Listen to my music. Some 50s stuff. Maybe a touch of Big Band, the Andrew’s Sisters, a little Nora Jones . . .
And to close some finished pieces:
The top image started as a photo of my grandfather’s car which had found its final resting place in a field somewhere between Marion and Freeman, South Dakota where he spent most of his life.
The middle image is a sign above a restaurant in Venice, Italy where Christine and I liked to grab a local beverage and rest up mid-afternoon.
The bottom image swings back to South Dakota where cousin Dean has preserved some of the classic farm implements our fathers used when they were growing up on “the home place.”
I’m going to attempt to close with one of my favorite l’image aumentare examples from the Grand Canal in Venice. Hope I can find it. Soooo many images:
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