Ruth West
I have been a digital artist for the last 30 years. Long before Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, I have been using the computer to make my artwork. Early work was less about content and more about technology- trying to get the art made, printed and seen. Now Photoshop is my paintbrush, with a digital camera, the world and the internet as my sources.The pieces for this book come from two different series, See-Sea and the Years.
See-Sea are my own photos collaged in a fifteen part series about how big / small the world is. This series combine Venice ,Italy and Wells Beach, Maine... Both are mysterious and mundane, populated and yet full of secret corners. They are far apart, but like everything in this small world, related by time and tide.
Years is an ongoing series to map history from 1860 to the current day. Typing in a specific year into a search engine, I gather visuals . I then create a story about these images, placing them in a Trompe l'oeil setting. My task here is to create the illusion of objects that "cheat the eye" making the viewer believe that they are looking at a realistic still life that never existed. By using the images gathered from the internet I am exploring both the year and what the web community decides is significant to post about that year. Like early collage artists who assembled their work from newspapers and found objects, I am using the millennium equivalent with the World Wide Web
