Art Muse 2.0

Metropolis

This is a tribute to Fritz Lang's robot in the movie Metropolis.

This image was created in a Postscript drawing program, where you can work with circles and squares and lines and gradient tones. I added the red outlines for emphasis. After the final result is achieved, it gets translated back to a bitmap so that it can be printed or displayed.

Picasso meets Frank Lloyd Wright

This is a Roman face.

To the left, something reminiscent of Picasso. To right, the face becomes lines that remind me of the decorative touches of Frank Lloyd Wright. It makes for an interesting combination.

When I work on a picture like this, I don't have a specific goal in mind and many times the end result is a surprise. Along the way, I'll try many variations, and many branches down different paths. And I keep all of the intermediate results for possible experimentation in the future.

I don't normally keep notes while I'm working, so the exact process for a picture like this is lost, and it probably can't be duplicated exactly. It's partly from laziness, and also an unwillingness to accumulate a giant pile of notes.

But there's a third, and even stronger reason. When I do an effect like this, I will just use it on one or two pictures, then move on. I don't want to be known for a particular special effect or for a particular series of pictures. I don't want to be typed, or to be known for a particular style. It's like an actor who became famous for a particular role or TV series, then has trouble finding work after that because they've been typed by their own success.

Another photographer once accused me of not having a distinctive style to my work. Although he meant it as a criticism, I took it as a compliment.

Portrait in shades of brown

To view this picture properly, scroll back until the image fills the screen, then step back fifteen feet or so, until you can see the details emerge.

Illusion

This image is one of my favorites. The effect of pieces of differently-toned paper floating above the canvas. Beneath the paper, soft shadows give a feeling of depth.

When I showed a print of this image to the owner of a gallery along the Place de Vosges in Paris, he reached over and touched the print, so effective was the three dimensional look.

Patternism

This image is pure Patternism We define this technique as the combining of sub-patterns that are taken together to create an image. When viewing a work done in the Patternism style it is necessary to first take a very close look at the image to see the sub-patterns which themselves are made out of colors. The groups of colors form the sub-patterns.

There are many colors in this image and therefore many sub-patterns that combine to make the whole. Perhaps you can see a mouth, and a nose and maybe a chin. Whether near of far you can tell it is an image of a shape that you recognize.

Now move back from the screen and you will see that you are looking at a face. The face is actually a statue in a museum probably somewhere in Europe.

Tony Karp has many styles and Patternism is just one of them. What makes Techno-Impressionism so interesting is that it covers a wide range and technology truly is an enabler.