Playing with Textures

Every now and then I like playing with photoshop to explore my creative artistic side. I was raised with the great painters - my mother taking me to the museum to see contemporary painters. She had books throughout the house showing the techniques of the great masters. I grew up admiring the likes of Monet and Degas and wanting to paint like them. 

Once I realized I couldn't paint especially as marvelously as they could, I turned to science. But I still held onto my love of beautiful art.

When I turned to photography, it was to capture scientific discoveries, experiments and progression. I studied the technical end of photography and turned to photojournalism for a while so I could capture the here and now, the event and (hopefully) the emotion it carried.

I left photography for a while to pursue teaching but still found a way to incorporate photography into my lessons with storytelling and photojournalism. And I painted (still poorly but I tried).

For the longest time I separated photography from art. My education emphasized photography as capturing the reality of the world and painting, drawing and sculpture captured the beauty of the world inside. Through "art" and artist could create a world that he or she envisioned beyond reality.

Then came along digital image making. I was resistant. Through digital image making one could "create" a scene or image not entirely based in reality. A photographer could create a lie! And that is not what photography is about. 

Finally I was won over by digital and even began playing with my images in photoshop to help recreate the image I saw in my mind as I pressed the shutter. And sometimes, as shown in the image above, a piece of art develops on the canvas of my computer screen, not quite based in reality - two images blended together to make something more than a record of the scene but a record of an artists eye that was never that good with a paintbrush. It may never match the great masters or be an inspiration to future generations, but expressing my inner artist brings satisfaction to my heart.

How do you express your inner artist, How do you bring satisfaction to your heart?