Geoff Ault

Geoff Ault.

Geoff Ault is originally from the Chicago area, he moved to Washington in 1957 where he studied art at Western High School in Georgetown with Leon Berkowitz, a Washington Color Field School artist and teacher.  Later he attended classes at the Corcoran School of Art where he studied photography with Mark Power .

What it deals with:
Geoff' work is a twist of composition, he likes to play with color and try out new ways of creating images.   It is painting to an extent in that he uses brushes, layering and blending.  The only difference is that his canvas and brushes are electronic, not physical.  This allows him to create work that can have various textures, colors that can be subtle or vibrant.  It also allows him to alter images to the point that they are unrecognizable from the original image.  


How it was made:
Some images begin as film photographs taken with low quality cameras that produce blurry, dreamlike images.  He scans the negative into the computer and what is usually a black and white image of something rather mundane can become a colorful abstraction.  Other images are created from objects placed on a flatbed scanner and digitally manipulated with photoshop to produce distorted, unrecognizable images.   A flower can become a landscape, a piece of slashed mat board becomes a seascape.  The possibilities are endless. 

How it differs from traditional media:
Unlike a painting on a canvas or physical art, it has a unique manipulated sense to it. You can tell it was produced digitally by the the texture and visualisation. It only differs from traditional media in the sense that it's digital. The basis is technically the same, you start on a blank canvas and build up layers and texture using different media and brushes, it's just the media and brushes are unrealistic and made on a computer, which is kind of nice because it's a different outlook on painting.

What equipment, software, approaches, techniques, effects and methods of presentation are used:
Equipment:
Geoff uses film camera's, a flatbed scanner and a computer.
 Software:
Adobe Photoshop to do all his digital editing.
Approaches/Techniques:
He takes a traditional technique and mixes it with a modernized form of art. He takes a picture on an old film camera which may be slightly distorted or in focus and then scans it in to his computer. He then digitally manipulates in photoshop using brushes and textures to build up a digital painting on top of his photograph.