Reductions Become Digital C-Type Prints

At a small art gallery in Chelsea, I stepped into an astounding photographic show of a glowing forest of trees that enveloped the room.  I couldn’t believe what I saw and took note of the media.  Not being a professional photographer, I had no idea what it was, but went home determined to look it up and try to use the same process myself, but using a painting instead of a photograph for my starting point.  I felt that a photographic image lacked the necessary distortion to mimic human experience.  It was that one point perspective problem that doesn’t show how the brain sees things, and also the lack of the touch of the hand that connects us.

I had already been playing with taking paintings into photoshop and transforming them into a world of ideas that were amazingly different than what might have been a primitive original, yet somehow the sense of life and movement that was in the original painting was still retained.  This method I called a Reduction because I used a process that reduced the number of pixels in an image.

I selected variations on a painting of a female torso that to me focused on the solar plexus or the inner strength of a woman.  The Sun Bliss torso I kept for myself to hang in the kitchen and challenge me to go forward and achieve what I want in life.

These images were brought to life as large scale digital C-prints.  For the process, a laser light exposed the digital file and a continuous tone photographic print was achieved.  Because the image is printed from a vector file which can be made any size, the size limitation is based on the printer, paper and mounting methods.

These pieces are one of a kind because Kodak discontinued their Kodak Endura Metallic paper at the thirty-six inch and forty-eight wide size.  No other paper can achieve this brilliant computer screen intensity, and even getting a close color on other paper has seemed next to impossible.  Smaller scale would not work for these images.  Of the five that were printed, two were face mounted to plexi.