The Painted Word by Bill Jones page 2

Each of the five artists in this exhibition collaborated with master printer Jon Cone. Cone's working method is that the artist come with ideas and various materials, but that the project must grow out of the collaborative environment. Cone derives this process from traditional printmaking, but brings it forward into the digital age.

Each artist engages the subject of photography, manipulating images by hand or through a layering of scanned surfaces. None, however, employ a consistent approach to the photographic subject, yet all fulfill the trajectory marked by photographic manipulators throughout this century. Each in his or her own way approaches the photographic subject and its relation to the removal of the hand. They all re-invent the process hidden at the core of photography which reveals its historic relation to painting.

David Humphrey typically uses family photographs, which he manipulates in Photoshop, as the source for his paintings. Humphrey's interest in photography is in terms of the way it can influence individual memory. In the Iris prints exhibited here, Humphrey has moved away from the family snapshots he has often used, to render the figure by hand and place it on a photographic background which he has constructed from scanned images of lace and other materials. The layering is subtle so that the parts are not apparent in themselves.

Humphrey's imagery is typically sexual, and evokes the subconscious libido. Images such as Phone Boy can make one queezy, sensing the subject's infantile sexuality, made more apparent by Humphrey's playful yet cruel distortion of the figure, making the heads appear larger than the bodies. The effect is further heightened by the use of trompe l'oeil effects, not only in the background imagery, but in the quality of the rendering of the figures, which, through the soft line made possible by the delicacy of the Iris spray, mimics the qualities of pastel or charcoal drawing. The mixture of effects overwhelms the surfaces and image layers so that a world is created, a most peculiar realm of fantasy, more hyperreal than surreal.

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	The Painted Photograph continued by Bill Jones
	Later in the century, as the efficacy of the mechanically objective aesthetic began to wane, a broad range of artists manipulated photographs in a variety of ways. Most notably, Andy Warhol, who used the photo-mechanical processes common to advertising and mass-media promotion to manipulate appropriated photographic images which he screenprinted and painted over. Warhol was the first to work within these layers of mediation, juxtaposing the hand with mechanical processes. Warhol used the media as a found object, as if Duchamp had reveled in his media celebrity and used it as another readymade. With the exception of the pop artists, who enjoyed great and lasting fame, and rare exceptions such as Sigmar Polke who produced a discrete body of manipulated photographs in the 1960s, photographic manipulation from Henry Peach Robinson to James Nares, Philip Pocock or Ian Wallace worked against the grain and was most often considered marginal. Only when encapsulated within the syntax and discourse of another medium was the hand's entry into the photographic process deemed central to the larger discourse of art. With the introduction of digitality and its synthesis of all previous media under one reproducible form, the disjunction of art and photography had come to an end, foregrounding photographic manipulation. In the dawning of the digital age, artists such as Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman manipulated photographs in a way that did not involve the direct entry of the hand, but, as with Warhol, mediation became the agent of manipulation. While muting the truth-telling objectivity of the photographic document, digital media makes all photographic images potentially manipulable and thus handmade. The challenge, therefore, is to find the surrogate for the hand in the new process which combines aspects of painting, drawing, and photography.
				Each of the five artists in this exhibition collaborated with master printer Jon Cone. Cone's working method is that the artist come with ideas and various materials, but that the project must grow out of the collaborative environment. Cone derives this process from traditional printmaking, but brings it forward into the digital age. Each artist engages the subject of photography, manipulating images by hand or through a layering of scanned surfaces. None, however, employ a consistent approach to the photographic subject, yet all fulfill the trajectory marked by photographic manipulators throughout this century. Each in his or her own way approaches the photographic subject and its relation to the removal of the hand. They all re-invent the process hidden at the core of photography which reveals its historic relation to painting. David Humphrey typically uses family photographs, which he manipulates in Photoshop, as the source for his paintings. Humphrey's interest in photography is in terms of the way it can influence individual memory. In the Iris prints exhibited here, Humphrey has moved away from the family snapshots he has often used, to render the figure by hand and place it on a photographic background which he has constructed from scanned images of lace and other materials. The layering is subtle so that the parts are not apparent in themselves. Humphrey's imagery is typically sexual, and evokes the subconscious libido. Images such as Phone Boy can make one queezy, sensing the subject's infantile sexuality, made more apparent by Humphrey's playful yet cruel distortion of the figure, making the heads appear larger than the bodies. The effect is further heightened by the use of trompe l'oeil effects, not only in the background imagery, but in the quality of the rendering of the figures, which, through the soft line made possible by the delicacy of the Iris spray, mimics the qualities of pastel or charcoal drawing. The mixture of effects overwhelms the surfaces and image layers so that a world is created, a most peculiar realm of fantasy, more hyperreal than surreal. next page