SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

CROSS DISCIPLINARY STRATEGIES TO RECREATE AND REMEMBER: ONE
PAINTER’S LOOK AT HOW MEMORIES CAN BE CAPTURED AND PLAY A
CENTRAL ROLE IN STUDIO PRACTICE
Judith Brassard Brown
Montserrat College of Art
With the advent of photography, practitioners in the arts and sciences were quick to use the
medium in their particular fields. Visual artists had a new art form. Additionally, painters
quickly recognized the potential of photography as a sketching tool, as an active way to explore
composition, light and color, or to collect information to bring to the studio.
The computer and digital technologies continue to facilitate dramatic revolution in studio
practice. With the appropriate equipment, we can now access visual information from personal
memorabilia, film, video, the web, and archival sources across time and cultures; as artists we
are not “bound” to our specific time or location and can relate to art forms, movements and/or
historical events in any way our work demands.
The “decontextualized” image is a recurring element in every discipline of contemporary art:
in paintings, prints, drawings, installation, sculpture, photography, and mixed media. The
ability to access, investigate and generate this kind of information plays a key role in the
generation of new art works; the taking of images from one context and reconfiguring them in
another is key to how artists are using the new technology. Artists can access museum and
gallery collections from their computers, use family photographs, video, still images off DVD’s,
scan from books or newspapers. Clearly, the collective body of work growing out of the process
and activity of using these new technologies to access images and as art-making tools, is in its’
infancy.
Excited by the possibilities, my own work has taken a reinvigorated turn back into a realm of
imagery dominated by memory. Through combining paint with personal, cultural, geographical
and/or political images, I create subjective “realities,” based on personal memories that,
hopefully, speak to our common concerns. For me, assembling the (initially) unrelated elements
of a collage, is akin to connecting to the disparate elements in dreams. Identifying and
assembling the visual elements becomes the first step in a long process of bringing order out of
chaos, in developing images that respond with a full range of emotions to my experience in the
world.
My earlier work prepared me for my current studio work; I feel I’ve been “in training” for
working across disciplines since I entered art school though it was not encouraged or supported
by the curriculum. As a young artist, I often felt constrained to fit into one neat category or
another. Though a painting major, I spent a great deal of my time working with other media,
first in sculpture and then in printmaking. I loved the logic and rigor of working in clay with
bas-relief. Later, I brought that experience to working in intaglio. Having many “states” of the
same work informed my direction in both form and content; using the physical layers of the
metal in tandem with viscosity printing and multiple plates, played a key role in my
understanding of color as I returned to painting.
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