| history could not have eventuated without the Macintosh computer and the sheer power of today’s graphic art workstations, but the ideas behind the works are unique and timeless. They cannot be re-generated at the click of a mouse, and some of the images that Stephen has produced have had literally hundreds of hours work invested in them to bring them to fruition.
The closest ‘label’ to Stephen’s early work could be photo-montage, but even so it goes beyond this. The technical exactness, the pixel-by-pixel painting, the physically large scale and resolution of the images and the degree of detail all go to create images that push the envelope both technically and visually.
Stephen’s work is unique in the traditional art and computer art worlds because he doesn’t rely on automatic or scripted image generation; he just uses the software as an interface to the canvas, just as an artist uses a paint brush or pencil as tool, the computer is Stephen’s tool – his screen is a canvas on which
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an image and an idea is formed. Shapes and textures are introduced or created by scanning images or using digital photography. The images are manipulated with various input devises, ranging from a high-resolution graphic tablet to a humble computer mouse.
So what does it make one of Stephen’s works worth in the eyes of a collector? Until a market develops that takes into account the nature of works of art that use a computer as part of the process then it is hard to say. Most collectable computer graphics images have had a historic and technical nature rather than a purely creative one. But this is slowly changing.
In the end, please take the information on the following pages into account if you need to justify to yourself your purchase of one of Stephen’s works of art.
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