Just a little entry to mention that I am currently the featured artist of the online web magazine, Cahoots.  Their website is www.cahootsmagazine.com.  Quoting from their description:

“Cahoots is an alternative Canadian online magazine for women that is more than your typical women’s magazine. Cahoots is a place for diverse, original, strong, humorous, fearless writing about things - such as work, health, home, life, the world - that really matter to women. In addition to articles, Cahoots also publishes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and beautiful visual art.”

Early last summer I completed my gradual move from the greater Montreal area to the greater Ottawa area, bringing all the bulky stuff I had temporarily left behind, notably my wide-format printer, the Epson Stylus Pro 7600.  Somewhere along the line, its jets got slightly out of alignment – no matter what I did to try to fix the problem, certain prints now have a slight banding problem.  It’s only (barely) visible up close — about a foot away — and under good light, but it’s not something I feel comfortable having, when selling fine art prints.  So, I decided, I’ve had my printer five years, I’d rather get a new one than tinker with it (or give lots of money to Epson repair people).

As I discussed in the previous post, I quickly eliminated the idea of a 44” printer, but still had to look at the competition amongst the 24” models.

The main contender is probably the HP Z3100/3200 12ink printer.  Some months ago they were slightly more expensive than the Epson 7880, and considered slightly better.  Now in fact, they are a particularly good deal in Canada, because the prices haven’t been adjusted enough for the new exchange rates, so they are selling cheaper than the 7880 by a few hundred, instead being more expensive by a few hundred as they are in the US.  Still.  The 780C$ rebate available up to Jan 31 meant that the 7880 was still, by a bit, the least expensive.   It is, by the way, at its unrebated current price of around 3500C$, about half what I paid for my old printer in ‘03.

It seems the main reasons that the HP is considered slightly better are the built-in spectrophotometer and the 12 inks.  The spectrophotometer is great for people who want as precise a color calibration as possible. But I tried color calibration with a spectrophotometer soon after getting my 7600 and didn’t like it.  Printing abstract art, I do just fine with loose color calibration; precise calibration or not, I’m going to tweak my files until the printer version looks perfect to me – and perfect to me means perfect as a print, not a perfect match to the screen.  For me the hassle of changing from Epson to HP – possible paper issues, presumable greater difficulty in reproducing my old work, just getting used to a different company’s printer – is as much of a disadvantage as the lack of a spectrophotometer would be for the average user.

As for the 12 inks, I never felt limited by the 7600’s gamut, and the 7880’s is even bigger, so I felt no need to have to be buying extra inks.  There’s the issue of wasting ink when switching between the black inks tuned for matte and glossy on Epson’s printers (except the 11880, the 3800, and the 7900), but I’m not a big fan of glossy.  Finally, in Canada they were still selling only the older 3100 model of the HP printer, while in the US they seem to have discontinued that model in favour of the 3200.

Another candidate I had to rule out was the Epson Stylus Pro 7900, the newest 24” Epson printer.  According to Epson, it’s an addition to the line, not a replacement of the 7880.  It has various improvements (e.g., 10 inks, being able to switch between glossy and matte without wasting ink, an internal cutter for heavy media, automatic nozzle verification and cleaning) that are quite nice, but, to me, not worth the drawbacks: an extra 2000C$ (taking into account the rebate, which was on the 7880 only) and an extra 55 to 125 pounds, depending on whether you believe Epson.com, or Epson.ca and other sites.  The weight is the worst part, as far as I am concerned.  The 7600 and the 7880 both weigh about 110 pounds, and that’s plenty already, for two smallish people to move around.

So, as discussed in the previous entry, I ordered, received and set-up my new 7880, with a few minor adventures along the way.  The next traumatic hurdle to get over (so past experience taught me) was to get its output looking how I wanted it to.  The last time I dealt with this – back in 2003 with the Epson 2200 briefly and then the 7600 – I had awful results, notably my orangey reds coming out very magenta, until I discovered Bill Atkinson’s free profiles.   It was like day and night for me.  My memory of the details is a bit fuzzy now, but from what I remember, before his profiles, even attempting to use a color spectrophotometer calibration kit, I was getting nowhere near what I wanted; after I started using his profiles, the color spectrophotometer calibration kit became an expensive waste of money for me.

My first thought, therefore, was to look to Bill Atkinson, and see whether he had relevant profiles up.  He has profiles up for the 11880.  Will they work for the 7880?  He says “They will not work well with any other printers.”  But the 7880 has a very similar (possibly identical?) inkset to the 11880, so maybe it’ll be close enough?  Maybe… Moreover, I read in a FAQ he wrote in 2006 that he never gets a result he likes on matte papers, so that’s probably why I don’t seem to find a profile for Epson Enhanced Matte, or Ultrasmooth Fine Art, my proofing/final print standards.  Bother.  But there are profiles for Breathing Color Elegance Velvet Platinum and Breathing Color Optica One Smooth which are … (goes and checks) … matte fine art papers.  So maybe I can try one of these.

…Monday I put in the order for a wide-format printer, Sunday I’m taking off the packing tape, installing the ink, the software (all this goes smoothly by the manual), and doing my first print try.  I don’t know, but it seems amazingly fast.  Didn’t like the colors in the first try though, and I went away and sulked – or did other things, at any rate – for a couple days.

The next Tuesday evening I finally feel up to trying to deal with the color issue.  (I’m feeling somewhat doom and gloomy with respect to this problem, thanks to past experience.)  First of all I note, when I actually compare my 1st test print to the equivalent from the 7600 (going and fetching the reference print, instead of relying on my memory of the image), that it wasn’t really that bad; maybe there is hope.  The next try I use the default {enhanced matte paper/matte black ink} profile provided by Epson, remembering that a similar profile had worked well for me with the 3800.  Indeed, my test print now has a quite decent correspondence with the 7600 reference print.  A blue section now has a slightly different hue, and a pale muted section of  reeds is less saturated, but everything looks good.  For that matter, the 7880 print is much closer to matching my screen than the 7600 one – an amazing fact that is less implausible when one considers that my 7600 was only vaguely color calibrated to an old CRT monitor on an old PC hooked up to it, not to my LCD screen on which I now do my initial creation.

I do several more test prints, and conclude that in terms of backwards compatibility, shifts are minor and can be accounted for; for future prints, printer prints beautifully – and incidentally much closer to screen colors than before.  Moreover, the fact that printer/screen correspondence is so good “out of the box” reassures me that my screen (and therefore my files) are reasonably well-tuned, both for web viewing and for printing at a service like Imagekind, where they are using Epson papers and ink, and presumably standard Epson profiles.  The new printer is also about 50% faster than the old one.

I later tried printing a test file suggested by Uwe Steinmueller and Jurgen Gulbins in their book “Fine Art Printing for Photographers”, full of greyscale ramps, color patches and so-called natural colors/memory colors such as skin colors, strawberries, sky blue and so on.  Viewing this print confirms my feeling that my new printer, printing on Epson matte papers with Epson profiles, is printing very well (not surprising, perhaps, on an nth generation pro Epson printer…).  And that I could stand, eventually, to color calibrate my displays better, sigh.

I ran my first nozzle check – nozzle checks have been automatized, which is nice.  There was in fact one nozzle blocked, though output so far looked fine. It printed out a pattern for the full strength colors first (a different pattern from the familiar Epson nozzle check pattern), scanned it, cleared the nozzles, printed a new pattern, and checked that it was now ok; then printed a pattern for the ‘light’ colors, which was fine without needing clearing.  Nozzle checks can also be run manually; didn’t try, but the pattern, as shown in the manual, seems to be the old familiar one.  I also ran an automatic print head alignment; it took much longer than stated in the manual (about 45 minutes for all three alignments), and took so many sheets for the first alignment that I was afraid it was in an infinite loop.  I switched to roll paper for the next two alignments, and all went smoothly.  Certainly a lot easier than the old manual alignments.

Now to get up to speed on Photoshop CS4 (I haven’t upgraded since CS2).  I have it on download trial for now – I’ve been vacillating between normal and extended.  Extended has some tempting 3D capabilities.  But it keeps crashing on what to me are relatively small files (e.g. 3000×4000 pixels) so I think I’ll take a pass.  I’ve also been browsing several Photoshop books before deciding which to read in detail.  Fraser & Schewe’s Real World Camera Raw with APCS4, and Evening’s APCS4 for Photographers are my favorites, as detailed, quality books for intermediate to advanced Photoshop users.  I also like Snider King’s PCS4 – the Missing Manual as a broad reference book for more general Photoshop use.

I’ve just finished getting my new wide-format printer (an Epson Stylus Pro 7880) up and running.  This is my second wide-format printer – I got my Epson Stylus Pro 7600 in November of 2003 – and it’s always a slightly traumatic process, purchasing a beast that usually lives in somewhat commercial locations, and setting it up in a very much residential situation.  I’m happy to say though that it was somewhat smoother the second time around.

I basically bought the same printer, two new models down the line.  Since I was always very happy with my 7600, it seemed a reasonable choice.   I eliminated getting a larger printer – after all a 44” printer now costs less than a 24” printer did in ’03 – because of its huge size; no need for that headache, considering that the options for printing the occasional large format outside of my studio are mushrooming.  My collective studio, the Atelier Circulaire, acquired a 44” wide HP printer last summer; moreover, I just learned of the existence of Daïmõn, a non-profit research/creation/production center for photography, multimedia, new technologies etc.  They have an Epson 9600, and the wonderful bit is that they are, oh, three miles away, unlike the Atelier Circulaire, which is now nearly three hours away from me.  A third option is the fine art printing (also Epson-based) webcommerce www.imagekind.com – not sure about their delivery costs yet, but their printing costs are very reasonable.  The 7600 and the 7880 both weigh about 110 pounds, and that’s plenty already, for two smallish people to move around; I was happy to have no reason to go any bigger.  As for other 24” printers, I did take a look at the competition, but in the end didn’t find their advantages enough to tempt me to switch.

So, Monday Jan 26 I got my order in, after getting my CDW.ca representative to assure me that I would get delivery before the end of the month (for the 780 C$ rebate expiring Jan 31).  I asked him to get back to me on shipping options and pricing – I was possibly interested, depending on pricing, on a more expensive service that would actually deliver the printer upstairs.  The quote was showing 20$ shipping.  That seemed very unlikely, but my representative thought maybe later once the order was ‘really in’ he’d be able to get back to me with more accurate information.  At any rate, he put into the system a comment for the shipping people to contact me for delivery details.

Tuesday around lunch time, having had no word from either CDW or the shipping company, I had the door buzzer go off.  A slightly worried truck driver had my printer in his truck outside, and was shaking his head over my residential address.  You buy a commercial printer, apparently you’re supposed to have a shipping/receiving department to receive it, not one skinny little artist.  The shipping fee really was only 20$ — and the driver was supposed to be able to drive up to a loading dock and trolley the package out.

Well he was a nice fellow, he was willing to bend the rules and lend a hand; but he was alone; I was alone; how were we going to get the 210 lb package in?  (The printer is 110 lbs, but with stand, ink and packing material, somehow weighs in at 210 lbs).  I suggested he should bring the truck around back, there would be less stairs to contend with (just to get to the ground floor; we clearly were abandoning any idea of upstairs delivery).   He was skeptical, said his truck was rather large.  I stepped forward to look at his truck – we were standing in my apartment block’s tiny foyer, or rather he was standing in it, and I was standing in the doorway of the inner door, holding the door open – and the inner door closed automatically behind me, locking me in the foyer with no keys, no cell phone, and, apparently, no-one home in the other apartments who could buzz me in.  In slippers, for that matter (and we have a couple of feet of snow outside).

The question was now moot — of whether it would be better to have the truck in front or behind, and whether we could move the printer with only two people.  So I got a phone number to call him to arrange delivery when my husband would be there, and spent a couple hours waiting for someone to come home, trapped in the little entranceway, pacing, ringing the doorbells of my neighbours every few minutes, doing squats, yoga, arm stretches, ski side-to-side jumps, singing (about being an unhappy cat locked up in a cube), thinking about ideas for drawings, thinking about ideas for computer programming abstract art …

The delivery was arranged for the next morning, I got a rolling cart from upstairs, and shovelled the back walkway in case we could convince the truck driver to come in that way.  He had his own ideas, which were to dismantle the box in the street; inside of some fifteen minutes, we dismantled and brought everything in, and were done.  I didn’t owe anything extra for 2nd trip or household delivery (although the shipping form had boxes to check for additional charges for these things) and the driver refused (very nicely) my offered tip for his troubles beyond the calls of duty.

Assembled the stand – this went smoothly with the Epson instructions.  Although I am perturbed by one thing: I don’t know what to do with my “K: Collars (2)”.  These mysterious C shaped pieces are listed on the stand hardware list – stand-alone sheet version – but are not mentioned on the stand hardware list in the manual, nor in the instructions there.  Nonetheless a lot easier than last time, when I made my own stand, because Epson hadn’t yet started selling the stand included in the printer price.

The next part was putting the printer on its stand.  This involved a few false starts of the two of us lifting up the 110 pound mini-monster, hovering over the stand, and not quite figuring out the alignment.  And having to put it back down on the table next to the stand, before our arms give out.  Not only you can’t see the stand you are aiming for, the manual is singularly mute about exactly how things should line up (and they do have to line up exactly).  The diagram is also singularly badly drawn – in fact, I’d say the stand has undergone a slight remodeling and acquired an extra piece since they did the drawing, among other things.  Hint: the rear round rubbery feet go in those rear round holes.

I haven’t put up the nice cloth paper catcher because I don’t want to leave it out in the cats’ reach, have it get covered with fur, if nothing else.  This is new, having the wide-format printer in a room the cats can get at, nay, the cats live in.  I’m definitely going to need to improvise a cover out of some old sheets, perhaps wheel it into a closed room if we go away.

I meditated for a day or so on how to rearrange the living room/office to incorporate the printer, so that we wouldn’t have to carry it upstairs.  I ended up with a working plan, but it required changing my L-shaped desk to a straight-through desk; moreover, I had to change its “handedness” (getting the short section to be to the right of the long one instead of to the left).  Luckily it all worked out, by dint of taking the tops off and putting them back on back to front, adding a brace here and a connecting segment there…  I spent the next day or so moving away all the stuff piled on my desk, taking it apart, prototyping my reassembly ideas, and getting everything back together again.

For comparison, in 2003, I bought my printer off of Ebay (new) from a California dealer; a couple hundred dollars of shipping only got it to Montreal airport.  I had to make two separate trips to the airport, in unpleasant weather, first to get the printer through customs, and then to bring it back to my home – by jettisoning all the packing material at the airport (the people there frowned at me but let me do it); the naked printer just barely fit into my Honda Civic hatchback.  I now have a Honda Civic sedan, so can’t carry around wide format printers anymore .

You see, now, why I dread getting a printer that’s any larger.

Well this is getting far too long; I’ll cover why I got a new printer, how I chose it, and my printing experiences so far with the new printer, in the next entry.

One of my 2009 resolutions was to try to do a better job with this blog.  Keep it simpler and more frequent.  Not daily, ok, but hopefully once every month or so, or who knows, maybe more?

I’ve been going over my website traffic numbers lately, hadn’t paid attention for a while.  I was not displeased to find that 5687 people (supposedly unique) visited my website last year; there were 8394 total visits.  (That’s up from 1518 people in 2007, to put it in perspective).  Moreover, a bit over 10% of these visits lasted 5 minutes or longer; that’s supposed to be a quite good ratio, actually.  It’s a good feeling to note that I am not quite invisible; my thanks to all of you.

Before going any further, I would like to headline my interview/featured artist page on MTLS, the Maple Tree Literary Supplement.  It should be up for the next couple of months in the current edition, and afterwards will still be available in the archived issues.

Since the interview was conducted over the internet – Patrick would send me a new pair of questions every week or so, and I would mull over my answers for a day or two – doing this interview was actually quite pleasant.  I was happy to be able to give reflective and well thought-out responses, instead of worrying endlessly beforehand, “hmm, what would I answer if he asked such and such,” and during, feeling hints of panic and “oh no my mind is blank!”.

I’ve been greatly taken with that photo phenomenon, Flickr, lately.  My photostream has been rapidly evolving:

I signed up in the last couple days of 2008 to host a bunch of thumbnail versions of images from this website.  I needed the images online to experiment with a databasing program (http://dabbledb.com/ — more about this in another entry to come) that I have been using to try to organize all my data on my work.  I couldn’t access my website at that particular moment, so I signed up with Flickr and stuck the thumbnails there in a matter of minutes — one of the joys of Flickr is the ease of posting.  (I soon realized this was an inappropriate use of Flickr and put the thumbnails on my own site; funny bit about this later).

I then thought, well hmm, while I’m here…. I’ve been meaning to share some of my photos, on an informal basis – to let some more of the nearly 2000 photos I took in 2008 have some chance at life beyond a dark corner of my HD on the one hand, or making it to the two dozen or so that I either published as finished work on their own, or incorporated into mixed-media digital prints. (In fact I meant to do that in this blog last year, but never got around to it).  So I cleaned up some photos and posted them up; it was liberating working with photos for web, a less serious prospect than for print edition.

At the next level, instead of just putting up pictures where friends, or my website visitors (once I get around to putting the link on my website, which won’t be till I post this blog…), might go to see them, i.e. using Flickr as a static repository of images, I quickly became interested in the community aspect of it – the seeing of others’ photography, and having others view one’s work.  This latter doesn’t happen without working at it – but it is straightforward and enjoyable work.  Find groups of work you enjoy, submit your work, find pieces of others’ work that you like, comment on them, favorite them if you like the work a lot, put them as contacts if they have many such pieces…rinse and repeat.  And all that looking at other people’s art hones one’s aesthetic senses and inspires one with new ideas.

Of course the whole process functions better when one shows top quality work, so, without abandoning my posting of “other photos”, I’ve also been posting a lot of finished artwork (pieces on this website), first the ice-storm photos and then my abstract art, moving to concentrate my networking efforts to what is closest to my heart.

As I started putting up my abstract art, people started commenting, favoriting and inviting me to post my thumbnails, which I meant to take off, but hadn’t done so yet.  (they were linked to my website, so people weren’t necessarily making their judgements based only on the thumbnail…) That wouldn’t do…  Encouraged me to get my act together and get them off of there pronto.

Networking on Flickr has had interesting effects on my website traffic.  My average traffic last year was 23 visits per day.  This month I have had spikes of 54 visits on Jan 8, and 250 visits on Jan 16.  I think it’s no coincidence that my Flickr stats show spikes on the same days.  (Not that all those people come directly from Flickr.  On Jan 16, I apparently caught a “Stumbleupon” wave  (the social bookmarking site that sometimes triggers mini avalanches)).  And I’m just getting started building my contact list on Flickr.  I’m quite happy with how it’s progressing though, and how quick and easy it is to build up a list of people whose work I like and who like my work.  I’m quite happy with my favorites list too, some interesting work there, and I invite you to take a look.

Finally, I am also starting to use Flickr at yet another level, the nearly daily visual blog, something of a graphical journal, to show the latest photos I’m taking or drawings I’m making, or small scale images created on the spur of the moment, made expressly for Flickr.  I think this is the ultimate, deepest way for me to use Flickr.  But since it’s barely been three weeks, maybe I haven’t finished finding new ways to see Flickr!

I’ve been very happy to get the time lately to restart some investigations that I put on the back burner for quite a while (i.e., years).  The first of these projects was to create a bank of images created using one-dimensional cellular automata.  My inspiration to investigate this comes from Flake’s enjoyable “fish and chips” book, “The Computational Beauty of Nature.”

Cellular automata (CA) images are a sort of life map for a community of symbolic cells, which may be in only one of a finite number of states.  In its simplest form, the map is represented by a grid of squares, each of which can be either white or black.  The top row of squares represents the initial state of the cells.  The next line of squares is the state of the cells after one unit of time, and so on.  Whether a given cell is live or dead is specified by a very simple set of rules. Its state is (defined to be) only dependent on the states of a few squares on the line above it, representing the lives of itself and a few cells around it, one time unit ago.  In the simplest interesting case, it depends on the lives of itself and its two nearest neighbors.  In the graphical sense, the square — which is of course a kind of pixel — is white or black depending on the colors of the three squares just above it.  For example, one example of a set of rules is shown here, in a figure from Flake’s book, that he kindly provides free on his website for educational etc. use:

This next figure shows the evolution of two black cells for a few time units following this rule:

The third figure shows the handsome Sierpinski triangles created by the evolution of this system on a larger scale, on the left, and the triangular froth created if we start with a random line of several live and dead cells. 

Further images and discussion can be seen here in this link to Flake’s figures, and this Wikipedia CA link.

Flake provides his audience with a downloadable set of C programs to experiment with topics in his book.  Happily this is the progamming language I decided to learn after leaving physics and finding Basic and Fortran compilers gone scarce.  Despite the code being almost ten years old (I run it in the DOS environment of windows) it’s up and running on my this-year’s pc.  I ran into some little problems, such as only succeeding in getting on-screen output, not file output (which I need, to further work with my image in Photoshop afterwards).  For the moment, my shaky knowledge of dealing with libraries of C routines, as opposed as a simple self-contained program, is limiting me from hacking in and modifying his code to suit me. 

I’ll have to learn, as there are other topics (notably those involving vector-based graphics rather than pixel-based — I REALLY don’t want to reinvent the wheel and make routines for vector drawing) that will really take that knowledge for me to do the custom modifications I would like to explore.  However, for the moment, no problem, as cellular automata are simple enough (and very much pixel-based!) and it was fun to program my own crude C routines that output cellular automata images to photoshop RAW files.  Meanwhile Flake’s routines remain more convenient for me for quickly studying many cases, and I made up long batch files of rules carefully generated with a mix of selection and randomness, and scanned through thousands of images to make my first swatch bank of 160 well-varied CA images/textures.  For artistic reference, I have sorted these images into many categories, varying from frothes in many flavors — small triangle, big triangle, modern, pacman and sierpinkski to name a few — to basketweaves, nettings and … alien invasion:
 

Each image is labeled with a sequence of numbers that tells me how to recreate its type of image in my own programming, so that I can generate it with my own routines, should I need to generate it at a larger scale than can be screen-shotted. 

This may in fact be less necessary than I thought at first.  While I normally have a horror of using things at such blown-up resolution that pixelation is visible, the pixels here are fundamental, significant entities in themselves, representing unique cells, rather than being just tiny units that in juxtaposition we use to compose an apparently unpixelated image.  I’m currently planning to be using CA images/texture in relatively small insets, at a scale where pixels are small but visible, perhaps the 60dpi level.  This means therefore much smaller files than I normally need. Here are some of my favorites:

In some cases I might use these files at even larger scales, for example:

giving a pronounced flavor of woven textile, possibly overlaying a finer resolution file to add subtle fine texture.
Cellular automata, in addition to being a way I can, as desired, use mathematics to generate images for my work, fits perfectly with my general mode in its interplay of constraints, randomness and selection.  My next step will be to use some of these swatches incorporated in my final work.  I have a huge selection already to use, but would still like to go back sometime and explore further with my own routines: more general rules (Flake uses a constrained set in his code), — and more specific ones — for some reason I’m having trouble getting his routine to do the simplest case, cells that have only two states.  I’m also wondering what would happen in the asymmetric case of not requiring the same number of neighboring cells on the left and on the right to influence the next state of a given cell.  Finally, since CA where each cell’s evolution depends on many previous states tend to give a too-garbled randomness, I would like to study such behavior as a small perturbation on evolution dependent on closer neighbors; in other words, have evolution mainly dependent on closer neighbors, but with small mutations in behavior introduced by the states of further neighbors (something that cannot be implemented in the constrained set of rules used in Flake’s routines). 

I’ve been getting my website listed in some art web directories lately, for increased visibility.  Notably, my website has been selected for inclusion on http://www.wotartist.com/, “an on-line art gallery and artist directory run voluntarily by artists with the sole aim to promote some of the best artists currently exhibiting on the internet.” This elegant site is currently weighing in at number 6 in Time’s “50 Best Websites 2007.”

I’ve also joined http://www.asci.org/, whose mission is “nurturing the intersection of art, science, technology, and the humanities.”  I could hardly find a more relevant organization.  Some VERY interesting sites here in the members homepages.  Unfortunately the page members a-k is broken for now .

One of the characteristics of my work is making use of the great artistic potentials of new technology while retaining a very painterly, natural-media feel to my work.  I am passionate about rich textures, fortuitous abstract paint effects, a dialog between spontaneity and control; the “computer graphics” look simply doesn’t appeal to me because of its flatness (or in the case of 3D work, smoothness), its appearance of being 100% controlled My goal is to create work where the use of digital technology without question brings something new, without sacrificing the richness.

For example a thing that fascinates me is the fractal nature of organic, natural-media work – the majesty and force of a gestural paint stroke, handwriting, ink pooling and spreading on wet paper, magnified many times over. With high resolution scanning, and large scale printing, I can portray the splendor I see in a corroded metal plate. Until 2003, my artistic production was strictly with traditional media (painting and intaglio printmaking); while I loved computers and used them sometimes as compositional aids, the output did not attract me. Then I discovered how much inkjet prints had evolved between 1996 (when I had last tried to do much with them) and 2003. Vibrant, lightfast, high-resolution printing on fine art quality paper…I was a convert, and from 2003 to 2006, while my source material was natural-media (ink and paint on paper and board, manipulations of metal plates, and so on), my output was purely digital printing.

In 2007, I decided to bring my alliance of digital/traditional aspects from the already prominent part it plays in the more conceptual phase of my creation to impinge also on the output stage, integrating digital printing into paintings on luaun panels and mixed-media works-on-paper.

well the 2007 page is up — or I should say, the 2007 pageS are up, as there turned out to be too much for one page.  As soon as I finish fine-tuning and catching my breath I will be blogging more properly.