Progression of Style
A study of my own creative process
Below is a sample of some artwork made over the years. These were primarily completed between 1985 and 1990 and follow something of a logical progression influenced by my interest in different print media, eventually leading to my work in digital art and design. I offer these as a view into how an artist might progress from one phase to another based on the nature of the work. It is interesting because looking back at the course of the work (which continues to this day), I am struck by how much the progression makes sense of my artistic path.
By the end of this series, I was fully engaged in digital design and my professional career took off. Again, my professional career paralleled the logic of the printmaking media in that I moved from print design, to desktop publishing, to Web design, to application development (I could show that progression here as well, but it is, for the most part, reflected in the chronology of my resume and bio.
This first group is a series of collographs in which I was interested in several things: 1) the use of viscosity in ink printing, 2) the use of paper as a sculptural element, and 3) a painterly approach to the print media. I have been very process oriented from the beginning (my strong Thinking function) and immediately fell in love with all forms of printmaking because of its strong process orientation. The collograph media in particular was a great media in that it is a tactile way of creating as opposed to etching and lithograph that tends to be far to precise and rigid (again, my counter-Feeling function wanting to balance out the Thinking side). These are not totally non-representational. As much as I wanted to believe that I worked non-representational, I later discovered that the images emerging from the work tended to follow very specific themes based on my engagement with literature or music or some other art form (note how one looks like a mask).
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From here, I became interested in doing a series of prints that relied totally on the printmaking process with little of no reference to painterly traditions. For the most part, I only used rollers and ink viscosity on flat plates as a way of capturing the dynamic of the process itself rather than any particular form. As you can see, some are very successful and others are just plane crap. I am showing a few random prints out of the hundreds I did during this time. For the most part, I used a specific color pallette and changed it up every once in a while, although when I did, it tended to get a wierd, muddy earthy tone.
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From the purely abstract, I became interested in print as a sculptural and performance media (this was influenced by my interest in the book as art). I did a series involving money that used print media to manipulate other printed media and turn them into performance or sculptural pieces (i.e., book forms). This was a radical departure in that I moved away from traditional art printmaking (etching, litho, etc.) and started using only graphic arts tools. This pretty much sealed my fate and I never really returned to the traditional media.
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Lastly, I took the final step into utilizing text and image to create graphic representations of ideas. I considered these to be something like book pages where one idea is represented either in a single image or in a series of images. I was heavily influenced by philosophers I had read. This is also when I started getting reintroduced to psychology (which is another circuitous, and synchronistic story). From here, it was a short hop into the graphic design profession, and that is where I launched a 20 year career that landed me…well, in a very unexpected but natural place.
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L. appellare “to address, appeal to, summon, name,” iterative of appellere “to prepare.” For more information about what's behind this site,
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