Artists Notes from Wayne Rankin
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Digital Art is the visual celebration of creativity, traditional techniques and the computer.
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Creativity encompasses everything from the imaginative manipulation of basic shapes, lines, textures, colours, text, digital photography,
images hand painted on paper and scanned. It includes scanned images from nature, digital video and bold artistic expression.
No creative avenue is ignored. There are endless possibilities for exciting new expressions of art.
Materials
Each work in the Gallery is an original, once only creation, not to be reproduced for sale. Materials include the full range of realistic pens, pencils, brushes, markers and other tools available in the software I use: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe After Effects, Corel Painter, Apple Final Cut Pro to mention a few.
All works are printed on archival canvas. Each is a Superior Fine Art Reproduction from Archival Museum Quality Digital Printing and applying the 'GICLEE' Fine Art Trades Guild standards.
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The outtakes of Wayne's unique combination of artistic talent and digital design expertise has been described as follows:
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"In representing Australian flora and fauna the effect is one of both verisimilitude and complete artificiality, having properties both of collage and filmic atmospherics. It is an artistic aesthetic no more artificial than watercolour, pen and ink or engraving, yet like the invention of photography, which is the computer’s immediate aesthetic ancestor, it is the overt ‘naturalism’ which makes for ambiguity more disturbing than that of the pen and ink tradition.
The opportunity to layer an image with multiple visual and symbolic referents graphically increases and the ‘artistic play’ often teeters between an appearance of magic realism and a confusing montage."
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Extract from exhibition notes: “Away with the Birds” Exhibition, Australia Post Post Master Gallery, Melbourne 2003. Further detail below.
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Australia Post Stamp Series: Case Study (Example, Left)
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"In July 2004 the final designs in “The Nature of Australia” Series of stamps were released. These were part of the Definitive Stamp Series for Australia Post which began in 1996 and featured flora, fauna and habitats of Australia. The complete series of stamps were designed and digitally imaged by Wayne Rankin.
To many the stamps appear to be a photograph - well, they are partly correct -however each stamp is a mixture of many photographs and digital effects montaged to create the final stamp. Each element must be authentic to nature, the species and the habitat and the size relationship to each other is very important.
By the mid 1990s computer-generated software meant that finished art could be produced with greater speed, slower illustrational processes by-passed and typographic details created and finished by the same designer. The new graphic technology met the demands of current stamp design production and printing deadlines.
The Rankin designs for the the 1996 and 1997 Nature of Australia definitives create a computer-derived visual aesthetic that was essentially unprecedented. In representing Australian flora and fauna the effect is one of both verisimilitude and complete artificiality, having properties both of collage and filmic atmospherics.
It is an artistic aesthetic no more artificial than watercolour, pen and ink or engraving, yet like the invention of photography, which is the computer’s immediate aesthetic ancestor, it is the overt ‘naturalism’ which makes for ambiguity more disturbing than that of the pen and ink tradition. The opportunity to layer an image with multiple visual and symbolic referents graphically increases and the ‘artistic play’ often teeters between an appearance of magic realism and a confusing montage. Flora and fauna on stamps, as in other kinds of computer-generated art, takes nature more and more into fantasy and the world of pure symbol.
The vocabulary of image and composition that Rankin creates in the Kakadu Wetland image of 1996 in which the Brolga flies through an unearthly dream-like landscape, continues in the 1999 Coastal Nature of Australia.
The tenets of western art - visual relationships between depth and flatness, scale, foreground, background and composition - have now been rewritten and given new expression." (Full quotation from above described Australia Post Exhibition et al.)
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Wayne Rankin's Biography
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Back to the Wayne Rankin's Gallery
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