Catherine McIntyre
From an illustration background, I currently work as a computer-based graphic designer. The work presented here is the latest in an ongoing personal project which has been developing for many years, through a variety of media, along several major themes.
The nude is a natural symbol of the laying-bare of innermost feelings, and has been a continuing metaphor in my work. It can radiate well-being, or vulnerability and weakness; it can symbolise humanity´s deepest essence, or that of the natural world; it can be idealised, realistic, grotesque, dismembered, impersonal, abstracted. The endless ways of representing the nude all carry with them resonances inevitably associated with the depiction of ourselves at our most unprotected. Images of the nude are impossible to ignore.
I started in the life studio, which teaches an understanding of form, light, and dimension. An abiding fascination with anatomy, the mechanics and moods of the body, and measurement was born here. A Masters degree in photography began the exploration of a nude at once more, and less, literal than that of the drawing class. The images began to assert themselves, to become ends in themselves; they learned to express very personal philosophies, obsessions, states of mind and emotions.
The layering techniques available in Photoshop were a revelation. Initial attempts at collage had always been restricted by the given scale and colour of found objects and photographs, and by the physical problems of attachment; translucency, too, was not a variable. In Photoshop, there are no such restrictions. Images can be compiled from widely differing sources and fine-tuned with unprecedented subtlety into a coherent whole.
The images work, I hope, on two levels. On the aesthetic level of texture, colour and pattern, the work is often about finding correlations between natural and manufactured objects in decay. The laws of physics act equally upon nature and the work of man; some pictures show nature asserting itself and reducing man´s efforts to their original elements, while others have nature under threat from encroaching industrialisation. This latter feeling of weight, crushing, compaction, pinning down and hemming in, isolation and ultimately of threat, became elements of the second, emotional level of the work.
The theme of ageing is also important in the textural elements of the work; the beautiful effects of weathering and distressing on often very unprepossessing substrates being at once destructive and creative carries a paradox mirrored in the ageing of the individual.
A second major theme is the difficulties of communication. Any conversation is a microcosm of the dissembling, misunderstanding and pretence of everyday transactions. The space between implication and inference, into which so much of importance seems to disappear, the gap between the projected and the true self, the misapprehensions inevitable when thoughts are translated, more or less efficiently, or not at all, into words - all these are the subject of much of my latest work. The nude has become a symbol of veracity, lack of pretence, honesty - and vulnerability.
The most important features of Photoshop to my work are layer masking and opacity settings. The ability to edit the elements of an image for hue, saturation, translucency, contrast, and scale is also vital - all things which are impossible in standard collage techniques.
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