Many of the images I’ve worked on in the last couple years have been small, mixed- media efforts on paper involving manipulation by hand of digital images and resulting inkjet prints. The process: by printing on a paper surface that prevents the ink from bonding, the highly unstable, color-fugitive, wet ink images can be profoundly altered in a number of ways (painted into with oil and/or water, moved about with fingers or sticks, sgraffito marking, etc.), photographed (a step that both documents the process up to this point and prevents further—usually rapid—image deterioration), then reprinted on archival paper and reworked with all sorts of media such as gouache, pastel and charcoal. In this manner, what began as a photograph, or other digital image, undergoes a sea change of alteration in a variety of ways and becomes something else—some other sort of image.
While my image-making appears to be loosely tethered to the natural world for thematic nourishment, I seem to have a horror of making stuff while maintaining a firmly fixed conceptual agenda in place as a guide. This may imply that I have no clear idea about how to navigate an emergent composition by any straightforward means— which is an approach that closely resembles how my mind works 24/7.
-David
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fullfathomfive.squarespace.com
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