Photo-painting

I developed this series during the pandemic, looking to reimagine my visual language and explore digital media as I did not have studio access to accommodate painting in my usual large scale format. Looking through my archival photographs, I was reminded of the themes of change in the poem Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold. The pieces from this series are subsequently inspired by and titled with lines from the poem.

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I layered the images in Photoshop, playing with their transparency and erasing sections to build the piece in thin layers, the same way I do with my paintings. I found that this sort of photo collage or “photo-painting” enabled me to interlace direct photographic documentation with visual manipulation and mapping, moving towards an output that encapsulates both my perception and my interference with lived reality.