Born in New York City, he has lived in Minnesota, New England, West
Virginia, Scotland and France. He is now a resident of the San Francisco
Bay Area of Northern California. He received a B.A. in Art at Stanford
University, a Master's Degree in Printmaking from San Francisco State
University and has taken numerous courses in Graphic Design and Digital
Media at The University of California at Santa Cruz and Foothill
College, trying to stay just ahead of the cresting wave of technology.

His art first appeared internationally in a gallery in India at age 5,
as part of a world-touring show hosted by the United Nations. Since then
his award-winning prints have been shown on the east and west coasts of
America, in America's heartland as well as in Germany and Australia.

Artist's Statement - Night Blooms

Night Blooms are a series of digital art works which explore the space
in which Nature and Technology collide, merge, marry and multiply. These
images are a cross-pollination between a Macintosh computer imaging
system and the flora of a garden I created and have tended for many years.

These works are filled with time, seasons, forms, saturated colors and
deep black space. From my garden I harvest what is blooming, budding,
dying, colored, textured, warped or wonderful, depending on
pre-conceived ideas for an image or natural inspiration. I compose these
flowers, fruits, plants and vegetables atop a flatbed scanner linked to
a computer until I have created exactly the image I want. Then I create
a final high-resolution scan which I save and manipulate to varying degrees.

These images are concerned much more with form, shape, composition,
allegory and the emotional range of color than they are with flowers,
although without flowers none of them ever would have been made.

In these works I use the scanner as a camera, shooting each picture from
below. No film is involved. This is a highly improvisational and active
art. Scanning technology enables one to create "pre-scans" - quickly
created pictures of whatever one is scanning, which appear almost
instantly on a computer monitor. In creating each image, I do a large
number of pre-scans, physically re-arranging any or all of the picture
elements (flowers, grasses, fruits, vegetables, etc.) between successive
pre-scans with fingers, scissors, tweezers, clumping or random throws -
depending on what the image, emotion and notion require to bring the
picture to life. When I see the final image I want on my monitor, I save
it in Adobe Photoshop, a high-end image manipulation software program.

Photoshop enables me to alter an image's colors, saturation levels,
brightness, contrast, texture, sharpness, clarity, obscurity and almost
anything else. If I can imagine and scan something, I can create,
manipulate and image it. I remake and refine these images until they are
done, at which point I print them on a high resolution archival photo
printer. They can be printed at any size without losing resolution or
sharpness.

I am surprised and delighted by the promise and potential of this
disparate mix of mediums; (high-tech/grow-tech/no-tech) and it is a rare
treat indeed to have one's studio and computer system filled with the
sweet and heady scent of freshly cut flowers.

brown7560@earthlink.net

SEPTEMBER 2003 FOTO ART MAGAZINE