Ali White – Artist Statement
 'Are they paintings?' 'Is it photography'? The answer is both and neither. I painted and took photographs for a great many years, but these were quite two different things.Then in 1997
I discovered the potential of digital technology to combine both
in a single medium. Officially known as 'lens-based'(as opposed
to computer generated) digital art', I see it as 'painting by other means' using fragments of photographic images.
To me it feels like painting. My canvas is a screen, and instead of making marks with paint, I use a mouse to apply and blend elements of photographs I have taken specifically for that purpose - often much too small to be visible to the naked eye. Occasionally it is just a single photograph, rigorously worked on to achieve a particular result. But most of my work incorporates many hundreds (some over a thousand) layers of photographic fragments seamlessly merged into a single, very high resolution image which can be printed to virtually any size on almost any material.
On canvas they look like paintings, and photographs, or both, or neither. Mounted on boxes of different depths, assembled together and hung on a wall, they look like huge painted sculptures. This really is, I believe, a genuinely new art form that transcends the boundaries between traditional means of creating visual art.
Before I made this fateful discovery in 1997, I had been a psychologist, writer and musician, making art in whatever spare time was left over. It was when I came back from a year's travelling in south and south east Asia with 1,500 photographs and wondering what to do with them that I realised the potential of this new medium.
Passion became obsession as it gradually took over my life, getting me up at 5 a.m. every morning to squeeze a few hours in before I had to stop and go to work. I finally left my day jobs in mental health and the treatment of heroin addiction in April 2004 to become a full-time artist. Since then I have exhibited in many high profile galleries across the north of England and in Dubai. I have also completed a wide range of private and corporate commissions, and worked on a number of public and community arts projects.
|
