It always surprises people when I tell them I feel more creative and spontaneous using a computer to make art compared to when I made mixed media paintings. While it’s true that it took some time to learn the electronic tools well enough to get to this point, there is an incredible amount of play that takes place when I create images in Photoshop.
All that has a downside, of course, in that it’s important to always have a backup copy or two of everything, because when things disappear digitally, they really disappear. A recent failure to save a version of an artwork before I “saved for web” and closed it resulted in the loss of the high resolution version before it got backed up. What really became interesting about this failure was trying to reproduce what I had done before. There were so many twists and turns, I couldn’t even get close. There was no getting it back, so the only thing to do was create a piece I liked more.
The original:
The replacement:
Well, the replacement might not be an outstanding piece on its own, but at some point, I started seeing it as the right half of a diptych along with the previous piece in the series.
The Diptych:
I really like the results, and am happy I lost the original. I wouldn’t have created this work which is now a landscape with effective contrast of reality and metaphor.