Note: All submitted events must be approved before they appear in the calendar.
Artist talk: Kate Lowman discusses techniques used in creating prints shown in “leaf & luminosity,” showing at Washington Printmakers Gallery from August 29 – September 29.
I always begin with photography, but I never know what the end result of my work will be. Inevitably, my photographs end up modified or cut up / rearranged. Even those prints in leaf & luminosity which I call “photographs” have been radically edited. The content of these prints is the natural world: leaves, trees, flowers, parks. I work with the light and data in my photographs to find the essence of what I thought I saw (or perhaps what I wanted to see,) rearranged in the service of my own vision of the world and in service of the best print on paper I can achieve.
Some pieces in this exhibit are constructed prints combining bits of multiple photographs (see In the Park, below.) Others, such as Spring on Broadway have retained the label “photograph” only because they are single shots in which the original pixels remain in their original locations. The pixels themselves have been pushed as hard as I could push them, often using “blending modes” in varying amounts. These Photoshop tools are complex mathematical algorithms which interact with the pixels in the photograph. I have no exact formula – every photograph is made up of different pixels, and the results vary from one photo to the next, along with the number of modes used and the intensity of their application. I can’t predict the results: it’s always a new adventure. While all my work is done with digital tools, much of the work is manual: i.e., shading, highlights, and color are modified with a digital brush, sometimes on a pixel-by-pixel basis.
The final phase is test printing, which can take weeks or longer. I do my own printing on a wide format inkjet printer, using pigment ink on matte fine art paper. This phase is essential – printing my own work allows me the time and test prints I need to finalize the design, color and other elements into a completed piece, printed with the highest quality materials.
