Ann Conrad Stewart

A good metaphor for the way I make prints and paintings is the way I write- I am not a one-draft person. I find pleasure and take interest in the evolution of an idea or image and in the multitude of possibilities that exist to communicate an idea, believing that each layer and reworking adds depth, history, richness, and both mystery and insight to the piece. Along those same lines, I also believe that multiple looks at the same subject can lend a deeper understanding and that digital technology is rapidly changing the way we perceive things.

The past three years have resulted in a series of work that looks at landscape and water and at the ways in which digital tools are allowing us to see familiar things in a new way. Throughout history, advances in technology (the camera, the train, the car or the airplane) have changed the way we interact with and therefore ”see” our surroundings and, in recent years, the computer has emerged as a new tool in this regard. While I am interested in the way computers have changed the way I look at things, none of the works here utilize digital image making.

The primary reason I do not utilize digital image making is my long history as a painter and my fascination with process.  I am constantly amazed by the human component of making a hand-pulled print, a work on paper or an oil painting. Once the human hand becomes involved, the piece is subject to mutations and idiosyncratic evolution that makes it unique in time and space- simply the opposite of what a computer generates (a repeatable algorithm). While digital seeing is the starting point for any particular piece, it quickly becomes a springboard for compulsive, mark-making and formal explorations. What is “going on” in any print or painting has as much to do with meeting of edges, contrast between light and dark, interplay of lines and mass, building and destroying of forms, definition (or lack of) of boundaries and contradictory moments of energy and stasis as it does with the image or idea that may have set the work into motion.

My work seems to run in phases each with reoccurring forms or imagery (in this case landscape as seen in multiples and in “zoom” mode) and to wrestle with the contrast between the imperfect geometry inherent in that which is made by hand and the predictable perfect pixel grid of that which is made by computer, hoping that this dialog allows us to take a fresh look at the familiar!