ED SUBIJANO, Philippines & USA ❧

"Cherries for Sales" Ed Subijano

Ed Subijano from the U.S., who I haven't spoken to in a couple of years, caught me on Yahoo Messenger today and we had a good discussion covering a few interesting subjects, one was the progressive development of China and how pollution is an issue for the government and people in Beijing.

Another, suborbital flights around the earth as one of my "girlfriend", ooo la la, a woman and an Asian at that, is going to be one of the first set of women to take off in two years on a test run space tourism programme (maybe by then she'll be the first Asian woman to do this if other women prove daring enough to join her. You can count me out, I'm a big, fat, totally shameless, yellow cockle-doodle-doo when it comes to leaving terra firma).

Then, the "what-ifs" scenario of the Philippines if the form of government changed and there was a decentralization of political, social and economic power - what would I be in favour of ... that brought up my recall of this psychological test supported and filmed by the BBC in 2002 in a TV programme entitled "The Experiment"; and, finally, analogue and digital cameras, photography and digital art.

That's what long absence does to you, you have to try to catch up on news and pack everything in an exchange when you're able, and considering my hectic schedule and frequent travel, it's not easy touching base sometimes.

Ed's surprising. I know he's into photography professionally, but I never thought he'd produce something quite as fabulous as the digital artwork he's allowed me to use for this article. Three of his digital art work is represented here and they're quite beautiful. But then beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and perhaps we'll see the same thing.

Ed tells me the presentation of abstract work is entirely up to personal interpretation, that's true, but from my point of view, the interpretation should start when the art "talks" to you and draws your attention to it, and, if special enough, captures your interest. You then begin to "see" things. And what you "see" reveals to you the spirit of the artistic soul and how it explains itself to you through that one creative presentation.

Ed's work for me not only "talks" ... it "croons". And the result of his beautiful ballad is inspiration and this article.

Et voila!

Now, let me give you a background on my experience with digital images and ... digital art so you won't think I'm just a flighty so-and-so trying to discuss psychotic imagination induced by creative abstract renderings, and trying to pass my imaginations off as something authorative in the area of art appreciation.

The manipulation of a two or even four-dimentional image electronically on a digital format and media most times don't impress me, not when you know the tools to use and the effect of those tools on a normal image from the industry-standard photographic software, PhotoShop, and not when you used to market and sell Photoshop professionally in 1990.

I had to assess PhotoShop when it was released by Adobe in the early days. That was 1990, and Photoshop was officially in the market the year earlier (1989) which was the year I worked with Apple. I was one of the regional marketing directors for Apple Computer then and one of my regular task was to evaluate both existing and new hardware and software products for the Asia-Pacific market, and recommend an effective marketing strategy.

You have to note that Apple was not quite a household name at that time, not in Hong Kong, not anywhere in Asia. The release in the U.S. of the Macintosh was in 1984 with their famed commercial "1984" but Hong Kong and Singapore would not know of the Apple Macintosh until I took over the marketing helm to teach PC-trained Hong Kong and Singaporean sales people how not to sell the Apple like an IBM machine.

"Painting in the Street Corner" Ed Subijano

When Photoshop first released their software, it fascinated the creatives in all the advertising agencies we targeted. One of the first experimental photo-merge renderings they would play around with is attaching decapitated heads of male friends onto headless bodies of women friends and re-arranging them in uncompromising sexual positions. Of course this was much to the disgust of their friends! And funnily enough, there must have been some kind of telepathic agreement to do this among the creative talents we worked with in the ad agencies and publishing business because they were all doing the same thing around the same period. Naughty boys.

So through the years, you see more and more of how Photoshop is used.

And technology has developed so much and so fast that it's not Photoshop I have to monitor any more, there's Final Cut Pro, Maya and AliasStudio, Quantel, etcetera, etcetera.

Digital Art and the appreciation of such work in that genre is a fairly new one and it has not created, as of yet, a global impact, although it should. Digital art and the tools to create them are not easy to master, but if you're an artist and a true creative soul, you will realise that therein lies the challenge.

There was a time, during the Old Masters era, when paint and the colours required were selected and manually mixed by the artists themselves. That is an almost lost art in today's world. One of the techniques of the Old Masters in making paint was to work on a wooden surface mixing an emulsion of egg, oil, water and pigments to create oil paints, and the mixture of gesso from ground marble to make varnishes. You can imagine the amount of labour that goes into preparing the emulsion and mixtures.

Then, the assessment of the colour and degree of depth, the use of pigments from a variety of sources:

The most basic and important ingredient of all paintings is pigment, the agent that supplies the color. Humans have used pigments to express themselves with visual images for over thirty thousand years. The earliest painters probably used colored clays and iron oxide as pigment and mixed them with animal fat.1 Over time it was discovered that a wide variety of colors could be made from natural substances.

Pigments used during the Renaissance came from three basic sources: elements, minerals, and manufactured salts. Elements, such as carbon, gold, silver, tin, mercury, and sulfur were finely ground to produce black, yellow, and metallic powders. Minerals in the form of metallic salts, iron oxides, and copper carbonates, as well as colored earth or clay, were extremely important pigment sources.

Colored earth, which produces a wide range of rich ochre and yellow colors, was the easiest to find and was prepared simply by grinding and washing. Mineral pigments derived from stones, such as Lapis, were crushed and then ground to a fine powder.

All of the pigments derived from stone also underwent a multi-step washing process that removed impurities and allowed the artist to separate the pigments into several grades.

The third source, manufactured salts, involved either the direct combination of two elements, such as mercury and sulfur, which produced vermilion, or the manufacture of salts that resulted from the action of an acid on a metal.

An ancient recipe for making green pigment called for covering small copper plates with honey, spreading them with salt, and sealing them in an oak chest into which either hot urine or vinegar had been poured.

This pigment can be more easily produced in a more modern experiment by rinsing pre-1980 pennies with lemon juice and covering them with rock salt. After 2 or 3 days, some usable pigment will begin to form.

In addition, the Old Masters had to use the following tools:

• Gauze, stretched on a frame and drawn on, shows fore shortening and accurate layouts.

• Retical, a string grid on a movable frame held in one spot to relate size proportions. Van Gogh used one.

• Mirror, to see in reverse, placed to see the model and picture simultaneously.

• Black mirror, to check faults in tonality.

Recommended book:
THE MATERIALS OF THE ARTIST AND THEIR USE IN PAINTING
Max Coerner

The so called Claude Glass, was named to honor the landscape artist, Claude Lorraine. He did not invent it though. Gainsborough also was associated with this device. "It was a compact-looking fold up mirror, that was slightly convex. Either hand tinted or with a black backing. The overall effect for the artist's purpose was to allow the subtlety of the middle greys to emerge, while suppressing the overwhelming highlights. The darks were still preserved with detail. The convexity of the glass compacted the overall scene and aided in the area of perspective." -- The Science of Art, Martin Kemp, Yale University Press.

• Reducing glass, sees the whole picture without standing back.

• Colored glass, cyan will show the strength of warm colors, yellow will expose contrasts.

• Plummet, a weighted string to check against vertical.

• Pantograph, enlarges 2D images mechanically.

• Measuring stick, size relationships measured from an arm's length.

• Real color wheel, to show oppositions for mixing neutral dark in colored pigment, instead of using black pigment.

The whole calculation process was manual then and you should be able to deduce by now that painting was actually like a form of science and involved specific calculations.

It's not just all in your head and the urge to flow with a creative inspiration and to throw paint and colour as you wish.

Perhaps these days it should be easier with paints in tubes and the colours of the rainbow to choose from. But not with Photoshop.

"Bicycle Wheels in Shopping Cart" Ed Subijano

As I stated earlier, the challenge for the artist these days in working with Photoshop and creating Digital Art is the mastering of technical tools. I've illustrated the labour-intensive work involved in the ancient times with the Old Masters. In a serious pursuit of the creation of art and the releasing of creative inspiration, there's always the expected hard labour of love for art's sake, and it is never ever easy. Not if a true creative spirit intends to offer his gift of creation to the world.

Digital art should be appreciated, but only if it "talks" to you like traditional art.