CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Lives and works in Mountain View , California , USA

ANDSCAPES ( Woodless Woodcuts ) are a series of digital art works that express my love of the natural world and provide a graphic visual diary of my travels across the globe .

All of these images began as analog or digital landscape photographs . I have had a lifelong love of Japanese wood block prints . As a child , I was exposed to prints by Hokusai , Hiroshige and Hiroshi Yoshida . My mother ( born and raised in China and Japan ) had original prints by all of these artists which were on the walls of our New York City apartment from the time of my birth . I spent many years as a traditional and experimental printmaker , starting at age fifteen with wood and linoleum block prints . I moved on to stone lithography , etching , photo etching , photo silkscreening and cyanotypes . The toxic chemicals associated with these methods helped me transition into the digital realm . Photoshop saved my health and has been my digital darkroom ever since then . I have been using Photoshop since Version 2 ( June 1991 ). Most of these landscape images have been turned into a cross between woodcuts and photographs , though no trees were harmed in the production of these artworks . Creating them is a reductive process - removing photographic information and distilling the images into simpler visual essences . - creating sky gradients , keylining and outlining components of the landscapes and painting with Photoshop ’ s digital brushes . All are extremely high resolution files and can be printed at large sizes without losing sharpness and clarity .

Mark McAfee Brown http :// www . mbrownarts . com