Introduction
Hello, thanks so much for visiting my site, it's appreciated!
A little history. I guess I fell in love with systems art, or digital art, back in 1984. A good friend of mine invited me into her workplace one evening, to see what was reputed to be the first Apple computer to be imported into the UK. It was sitting on a round wooden desk, front of house, very much on display. It had a tiny built in monitor, and a mouse and keyboard attached. When once we’d powered it up, I found I could draw a pixelated black line directly onto the glowing screen. Amazing! I was hooked…
I was studying illustration at Bath College, a two year Btec course ahead of my Foundation year at Filton. At that time home computer systems were broadly unheard of, but a new machine, the Quantel Paintbox, was just beginning to be used in high end production houses in London, mostly for advertising work. As illustration students, we were lucky enough to be asked to attend a demo session to see what the future of our working lives would look like.
The idea that you could paint, draw, and edit with a stylus on system, in full colour, was mind blowing. The Quantel systems were rumoured to cost millions of pounds to install and needed a dedicated room for the array of Winchester drives they used to store the images. There were just two installed at UK art schools at that time, one of which was at the old Hornsey School of Art in North London, later amalgamated into Middlesex University. I applied and was accepted for the 4 year sandwich course.
The college had the smaller Quantel Harriet system, broadly designed for moving image work, running alongside a suite of Mac computers, including one Apple IIFX, with a dedicated colour plotter. At that time we didn’t have colour screens, but you could dial in the colour values, and they would be plotted by the printer when you hit Cmd P.
Around the same time, David Hockney and April Greiman were making waves with their early adoption of the technology, Hockney memorably printed a digital ‘original’ print on the front cover of the Observer colour section. Fabulous stuff.
On graduating I started work at Pelican Graphics, doing traditional artworking. A very few weeks later I moved on to Ace Studios in W1, which then rebranded as Carney Richardson Studios. They had just invested in a suite of machines and were forming a new digital artworking team. It was a good time, and I learnt a lot about rapid artworking for commercial clients, as part of a small team of maybe four of five people chopping out images for any and all comers.
In ’95 I decided to set up my own shop, Flux, and took on premises initially in Clerkenwell, and later on Greek Street, just below Soho Square. It was a lively time, and we made huge numbers of technically complex images for a broad client base, including Prada, Yohji Yamamoto, Nike, FIFA and British Airways, amongst many others.
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More recently, in 2005, I decided to pack up my London studio and head to the South West, my childhood stomping ground, keen to move away from the constraints of the art directors I was working with, and explore the power of the latest digital systems full time, to create new works that I believed could be more immersive, and more engaging, than the corporate briefs would ever be.
I haven't looked back since then, and continue to work, pretty much every day, in my studio here in Bristol, testing out ideas for generating new work that I hope progress the idea of abstract and colour space art for the 21st century.
The new images are largely concerned with light, line, colour and form. I tend to think of the work as a logical progression to the C20th modernist move into abstraction, fine art printmaking, C type photography, and more recently systems based working. I like to think that there’s a natural symbiosis between the work I’m making, and contemporary digital music production, dSLR photography, film and moving image work and immersive virtual 3d spaces. It’s a great time to be working, the technology continues to evolve at pace, and there’s a huge amount to enjoy. Ultimately I love the idea of using the latest contemporary tools to make new work, it seems to fit well, conceptually.
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My main body of work is mostly realised as photographic works, often bonded to plexiglass, I call these pieces 'constructed photography' or 'digital drawings / link here
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Additionally, I’m making works on paper, pieces which I print myself here in the studio, endlessly tweaking the colours, before editioning the drawings as 10 colour pigment prints, usually on Hahnemuhle paper / link here
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If you're not sure where to dive in, maybe have a look at my Overview pages, a linked visual directory of my favourite images from the project to date / link here
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Also of note is a side project I started in 2016, the Experimental Print Club, which offers a low cost way to collect the work, priced at just £30 a month. I send out 4 new editions to club members each year. To find out more about the club / link here
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If you’d like to know more please do sign up for my newsletter. I’ll keep you up to date with images of new work, invitations to shows and fairs, and a lot more besides. You can safely unsubscribe at any time / link here
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Or if you have a specific question, or would just like to get in touch, you can email me here.
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Thanks for reading this far,
With best regards,
Chuck