Digital image exhibit opens in Brownsville
BROWNSVILLE – A new innovative digital image exhibit titled “From Here to California” will continue through Saturday, Aug. 16, at 64 Crayons Cultural Center, which is located at the Thompson House, 815 Water St., Brownsville. R. Scott Lloyd’s exhibit takes advantage of current technology to discover fresh insights in familiar objects, many along a route between Pittsburgh and California, Pa.
A diverse selection from daily observations between Lloyd’s home in Trafford and his workplace as a member of California University of Pennsylvania’s art department, these ink jet prints present examples of still-lifes, figurative subjects and local landscapes.
“In these ‘free-hand’ images,” Lloyd said, “I attempt to capture what is visually new and interesting at the moment for this artist’s visual world – to say, ‘Look at this thing, person(s) or event at this moment, from this place.'”
Lloyd holds a master’s of fine arts degree in painting from New York City’s Pratt Institute and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh in art education. His education was reinforced through his experience as a teacher of workshops in holography at the Royal College of Arts in London, at Reading Institute and at Ohio State University.
He learned to work from ideas that he jotted into notebooks in a verbal/visual quick sketch.
But advances in the clarity and speed of digital printers, paired with the reduction in price during the last two years, made it reasonable for Lloyd to think of digital images as a variable art form.
“From Here to California,” garnered from thousands of such images, represents his first public showing of roughly 20 pictures from that mass of material.
“What a perfect show to open our renovated art gallery,” said Fred Lapisardi, director of 64 Crayons Cultural Center.
“Rachel Lloyd, an artist and Scott’s wife, offered to fix the place up before we mounted his exhibit. For the whole month of June, I felt like I was part of a team from TV’s ‘Trading Spaces,'” he added.
The newly smoothed and painted muted white space, with 64 feet of running shelf over three walls, represent a whole new approach to displaying art at 64 Crayons just as Scott Lloyd’s exhibition presents slices of his visual life that makes it possible to see the same thing in new ways every day.
“All of the images,” he explains, “are recorded by one of five digital cameras, never with a tripod, and printed as faithfully as possible from the original recorded moment without image manipulation.
“For 30 years, I used photography for film-based documentation of special events as prints and of art work in painting, printmaking, drawing and holography as slides,” he said. “But the immediacy of the point-and-shoot format and no-cost price per image presented a new freedom that neither photographic film nor sketching offers.”
While Lloyd keeps the image source potentials wide open, he does have a clear direction of interests. Specific personal aesthetic decisions do get made from mining several consistent areas of daily visual sources.
Currently, the still lifes are primarily about fruit and all things colorful. Two Maltese dogs, Puff and Zeke, are the most consistent daily subjects.
“They are available, willing subjects (for the right treat), formally fascinating for their white fur forms, and full of genuine expression of personality to which anyone can relate,” Lloyd said.
Landscapes are of four major locations. One is from the space seen from the life of a Trafford-to-California, Pa. Commuter – the road between these two places seen coming and going but rarely visited.
Lloyd’s backyard and the nearby “B.Y. Pond” presents “an always interesting to study, day and night, season to season, rain and shine.”
Visual textures and patterns captured from lifescapes everywhere in between, such as sidewalks and parking lots, form a miscellaneous third category.
“The fourth ‘scape’ is in the sky,” Lloyd said. “Cloudscapes are interesting for their hyper-realistic non-objective forms whose recorded image is only a singular view from that specific place and moment in time.”
Currently director of the fine arts gallery at California’s Mandarino Library, Lloyd also runs the campus non-toxic print-making studio and teaches a variety of art courses.
In the past, he has taught at Parsons School of Design/New School in New York City, the Lake Placid School of Art and Pittsburgh’s Carlow College. He was director of education at the former Museum of Holography in New York.
“The last three years of working with digital imagery spawned an entirely new set of directions in making art – not just in terms of expanding subjects and image content, but also expansions in the ways of seeing, gathering visual information and considerations of the final visual output,” Lloyd said. “This exhibition celebrates a mid-career artist’s rediscovery of the visual world and new ways of seeing it.”
For more information, call 724-785-9010 or e-mail begin Geezersbks@att.net Geezersbks@att.net end
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