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Artists utilize photos for distinctive artwork at Summit Artspace
By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art and architecture critic
Published on Sunday, Feb 03, 2008
The impact of digital photography on art and art making is becoming more evident.
Through March 1, Summit Artspace is exhibiting From Camera to Canvas: Jerry Domokur, Michael Gable, Donna Webb because each uses digital imagery to create works of art.
Domokur uses a digital camera and hours of Photoshopping to turn everyday images into stunners. Gable often buries photographic images in his work, using them as both catalyst and inspiration for his lyrically abstract paintings and drawings. Webb plunders obscure, vintage texts for arcane imagery, which she uses in her beautifully wrought ceramic tiles.
''We came up with the idea of Camera to Canvas to explore the artist's use of camera imagery and the processes involved — the thought process — as well as where it goes,'' said Joan Colbert, Summit Artspace gallery director.
This show offers a look at different kinds of processes: the camera image as primary medium; image as inspiration; and image as source.
It also emphasizes surface. ''It's whatever surface the artist chooses to work on,'' Colbert added.
Domokur sometimes makes a straight digital print; other times, he prints onto photographic paper and develops the image chemically. He also occasionally uses heat transfer, pressing his images face-down onto fabric, much like printing a T-shirt.
Gable often uses whatever comes to hand, explaining that he doesn't want to be constrained by costly materials, so his images often get put onto pieces of cardboard or, in one instance, a torn pillow case.
Webb puts all her images onto ceramic tiles, then arranges them thematically.
Of the three, Domokur is the most prolific by far. He said he brought in 21 pieces, of which 15 were selected for the show.
His process is to take images of a certain site, then manipulate and layer them until he gets the effect he wants, a process he calls ''collaging.''
That's what's at work in the hurly-burly image Ohio State Fair, a heat transfer on paper of a booth and environs on the fair's midway, with elements — and color — punched up to the ''wow'' level, then layered within an inch of its life.
This is an image that keeps you looking, not only to figure out where all the elements come from, but also to try to guess how Domokur did it.
Crash, on the other hand, is a pretty straightforward (for Domokur) photograph of a wrecked car, but given the high-tone treatment of a Lambda print, an archival process in which the image is printed on photo paper and developed in a darkroom.
Gathering is an image that came from the pages of the Beacon Journal when University of Akron students lighted a bonfire during spring semester.
''I thought it was a neat image, so I changed it and played around with it more,'' he said. ''It was a black-and-white image, then I colorized it, cut and pasted, overlaid it and did some drawing, using a Wacom tablet.'' The resulting image has been so transformed that there's almost no hint of the bonfire that inspired Domokur in the first place.
Domokur also likes to do panoramas, then paste them together, either in PhotoShop or using paper and glue, creating long, narrow vistas into which he often inserts borrowed images from such sources as magazines.
Frolicking is one such image, with nude young women borrowed from a Japanese magazine, then blurred, hyperextended and colorized and inserted into a manipulated, panoramic vista of his own backyard.
''I was going to be an illustrator at one time,'' Domokur said. ''Then my nephew gave me a computer. It took me quite a while to work it, but I finally learned to manipulate images in it. Maybe because of my background, that's where I went with it.''
He continues to show his hard-won mastery in images such as Blue Moonlight Garden, which he said he put in the show ''to demonstrate that I could work it in any manner.''
In all these, the imagery is for the most part recognizable, but Domokur said he's recently begun going more abstract. These works have attracted the notice of several show judges, including the one who juried the Butler's 71st Area Artists Annual Exhibit on view through today in Youngstown.
While Domokur is more than forthcoming about how he creates his works, Gable is somewhat the opposite.
''These come from an assortment of references,'' Gable said, gesturing at the nine works he has in the show.
''I have stacks and stacks of photographs and drawings,'' he added, indicating several feet with his arm raised. ''I don't have ideas. I just go and start making marks. There's no one particular subject matter. I'll just start pulling things from anywhere and everywhere.''
Gable would admit to influences from Arshile Gorky and Cy Twombly, and these are evident in his work. He especially seemed to like the association with the Armenian Gorky, noting that he's one-fourth Armenian. But he didn't care for the Abstract Expressionist label, because he said that hints at certain attitudes and what he considers false posing.
''It's maybe a little bit A-E, but it's subject matter I'm trying to get away from — recognizable imagery — which is why I use only a handful of recognizable references. . . . Recognizable imagery and representation carry too much baggage. Too much is read into it, and too much I don't like to talk about.''
Gable's use of photography is straightforward, with no manipulation.
''A lot of my photographs tend to be close-up examinations of things,'' he said. ''I approach a photograph like a painter. I emphasize the flatness and the composition.''
All Gable's works in this show are untitled. There are two works on something other than cardboard or paper, and those are the large oil on canvas Gable descriptively labels ''mylarmaster'' on the publicity photo, and the oil on linen he's labeled ''pillow.''
The oil on canvas seems to have deep space behind the strokes and shapes floating on its surface. An elegant work with echoes of Twombly, it has already been sold. The work described as ''pillow'' has been painted on a pillowcase, a la Robert Rauschenberg.
''It was just a piece of fabric lying in the corner of my studio with some water stains on it,'' Gable said. ''I painted it on one side and one day I turned it over and I liked it. It's bleeding in from the other side. I think I may have realized what was happening on the other side and tweaked it from the opposite side.''
I won't tell you what images he collaged into them, because, as Gable correctly pointed out, that tends to make the viewer look for, then zero in on, the recognizable portion of the painting. That destroys what he's trying to do and in a sense causes the painting to break down, once you see the image.
It's very difficult to keep people from looking for recognizable imagery in abstract work because that's what our brains are hard-wired to do. So Gable's only recourse is to obscure as much of the original inspiring images as possible and hope inquiring minds don't find them.
Webb, on the other hand, is perfectly happy to use borrowed images, almost completely unaltered, except perhaps for changes in colors, to make her large ceramic tiles.
''These are all images from the fabulous 33-volume Istanbul Encyclopedia,'' she said.
''Ohio State is the only place that has it. Even though it was done in 1958, there are all these images of people, houses, festivities that are quite old, and I've been going through it and picking out images. I have a Turkish friend who I've been going to to find out who these people are and to translate for me.''
Her investigation of this source material has not only given her new and unusual imagery to work with, but it also has taken her to Turkey twice. And she's discovered not only is art approached in a very different way in Turkey than in the United States (or in Europe, for that matter), but also that sometimes making art in Turkey isn't safe.
The first two tiles in the exhibit are portraits titled Sait Faik and Safiye Ayla.
''Sait Faik was a short-story writer,'' Webb said. ''He wrote about the ethnic groups like the Armenians and the Greeks, and writing about them put him in jeopardy. He got a lot of criticism for writing about them. He's sort of like Hemingway, short, direct sentences.''
Safiye Ayla was a famous singer, Webb said. Often dubbed the ''suffering'' or ''grieving'' nightingale of Turkey, Ayla made some 500 recordings and appeared in movies and concerts and performed on Ankara and Istanbul radio stations.
''I'm interested in Turkish culture and the contrast between the West and the East, the medieval and the modern,'' Webb said.
''I've been there twice. In 2005, I lectured at Marmara University and got invited back. When I returned, I took students with me.''
She said she went to the Istanbul Modern Museum, ''and I discovered fabulous modern art works by people I'd never heard of.''
Webb said that she has spent more time since coming home, however, exploring Ottoman ideas about art. ''It meant looking at the art world again because it's not what I thought it was.
''In books that I looked at, some of the 19th-century Turkish women wore veils, but they were very stylish and pretty, transparent and flirty, But the last time I went to Turkey, the women who wore veils wore these heavy, black things and the women were militant about that. Things are going backwards, it seems.
''Here's Ataturk,'' she said, pointing to one of the tiles showing the face of the former Turkish strongman looking through a screened window while a bird sits in the foreground. ''He was an incredible politician. But you can't make fun of him like this in Turkey. It's against the law.'' Another of her tiles, titled Denge (Balance) shows a small leopard in one corner. ''Denge means balance, and that's the thing about Turkey, it's a balance between East and West and it's carrying on this incredible balancing act between all these various ethnic groups,'' Webb said. ''That's the Istanbul leopard, which has just become extinct. My friend said a villager just killed the last one — at least that's what they think. I hope it's not true.''
Two gallery events will be held during the balance of the show: a composition and blind contour drawing workshop with Gable on Feb. 16; and a postcard collage workshop with Gretchen Bierbaum ($5 materials fee at the door) on March 1.
Dorothy Shinn writes about art and architecture for the Akron Beacon Journal. Send information to her at the Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640 or dtgshinn@neo.rr.com.
The impact of digital photography on art and art making is becoming more evident.
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