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artist: ROBYN JOHNSON-ROSS
more work by Robyn Johnson-Ross
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In February 2005, Washingtonart invited Robyn Johnson-Ross to write about her work in the realm of digital art. WIth an impressive background in painterly, expressive painting, Robyn has been focusing on creating digital images, movies and flash animations for the last six years. Washingtonart asked her to talk about her introduction to digital media, and how she transitioned to them from the more traditional medium of painting. Robyn Johnson-Ross: Obviously, it all starts with motion. In my paintings the important thing was potential movement: the before and after states for example of a gesture - all of it implied in the way it was painted, the hidden element in art. For me, Poussin and Cezanne are important because their work contained hidden potentials. You saw what they did in their pictures and then you could imagine where they came from and were they were going because their paintings were so suggestive in just this way.
So my own transition to animation, which is precisely about movement, was a natural continuation of my aesthetic in painting. Aside from the fact that I had gotten a Mac, had become enchanted by the logic of the computer and by the specific processes one had to go through before anything at all could be produced, there were other more personal reasons as well.
Animation involves drawing which has always been the foundation for my art. Anything I have ever painted comes from exploratory drawings about space and positioning. In Flash animation all images demand a graphic analysis translated into vector code. This analysis too was about spatial position. Flash software was perfect for me because it is basically quite primitive: there are a relatively limited number of tools for manipulating the image, so it is necessary to invent techniques to make it do what you want it to do and I very much enjoy this challenge. The endless experiments in visual design, and now in audio correlation, are something familiar to my way of working.
The technical demands of animation are significant, and I thought that in this there would be an opportunity to have a dialogue with other artists in the same field. Technology is a straightforward conversation: you do x and you get y. Then, once the x`s and the y`s were explored, one could proceed to the aesthetics of the story, the imaging and the style. I badly wanted a foundation for this kind of conversation. It was my experience in painting that discussions avoided anything tainted by aesthetics (I suppose because of the pared down dead panned `what you see is what you get` mentality) and instead had become almost exclusively about personal psychology and career options rather than the art itself. By the time I turned to the computer I had had enough of the resume and psychological/ social dogma. But the saga of the computer is an on-going story whose subject is the integration of my artistic pathways. After five years of animation and approximately ninety flash movies and as many drawings on my site, I have learned a few things which have been the impetus for the digital photos of the last year, and the drawings which I am printing in Photoshop, a pixel by pixel process.
And really, I have to say that nothing has changed in my career except the means of expression. It is still space and motion. The computer is just another tool, another means perhaps more relevant to our times, but this does not seem particularly important. What is important is to have a medium which forces you to consider how in hell you are going to make this picture work as a visual thing on its own terms. I use the word `force` because I think that the digital realm, being an infinite reference system with specific rules and regulations, demands and thus enhances the facility for comparison, choice, and decision making. In my opinion it is in this context that `artistic freedom` has meaning. Perhaps you could call it a substitute for the community of artistic dialogue which once existed. more work by Robyn Johnson-Ross
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