LandE scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
Mark McAfee Brown
Lives and works in Mountain View, California, USA
L
ANDSCAPES( Woodless Woodcuts) are a series of digital art works that express my love of the natural world and provide a graphic visual diary of my travels across the globe.
All of these images began as analog or digital landscape photographs. I have had a lifelong love of Japanese wood block prints. As a child, I was exposed to prints by Hokusai, Hiroshige and Hiroshi Yoshida. My mother( born and raised in China and Japan) had original prints by all of these artists which were on the walls of our New York City apartment from the time of my birth. I spent many years as a traditional and experimental printmaker, starting at age fifteen with wood and linoleum block prints. I moved on to stone lithography, etching, photo etching, photo silkscreening and cyanotypes. The toxic chemicals associated with these methods helped me transition into the digital realm. Photoshop saved my health and has been my digital darkroom ever since then. I have been using Photoshop since Version 2( June 1991). Most of these landscape images have been turned into a cross between woodcuts and photographs, though no trees were harmed in the production of these artworks. Creating them is a reductive process- removing photographic information and distilling the images into simpler visual essences.- creating sky gradients, keylining and outlining components of the landscapes and painting with Photoshop’ s digital brushes. All are extremely high resolution files and can be printed at large sizes without losing sharpness and clarity.
Mark McAfee Brown http:// www. mbrownarts. com