Thank you to the many people who share their responses to my work and the wonderful conversations we have together✨ Susy Kamber
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Artist Interview on Twisting Pixels
How did you first get into digital art?
My entrance into digital art came about when I asked someone how they make photographs look stylized. I was told to look at a few apps as a beginning. Prior to doing this the only concept of editing was to crop family photographs.
Why did you choose digital art as your medium?
Well, both my parents enjoyed and created beautiful artwork using oil paints, pastels and watercolors. As a young child I watched them working together and sometimes they let me dabble in these art materials, but mostly I loved the smell of turpentine and cleaning their paintbrushes was fun.
Choosing digital art as a medium is an approach that in many developed apps simulates the use of traditional art techniques and materials. Digital brushwork can be utilized in many forms as well as the enormous potential for exploratory techniques and mixed media approaches. I love the digital arts marriage with traditional artistic history. It is an endless wave in a slow moving ocean you can touch. Thank you to the many innovative app creators who continue to inspire and make it possible for all digital artists to incorporate this amazing technology into their work.
Tell us about your artistic style and what inspires and motivates you?
Color, light and shadows are the protagonists of my work. They speak as such and desire to occupy the composition with balance and purpose. Learning to hear the message beyond a pleasing presentation when one views my work is really what I’d like to accomplish. Art is supportive to reach this goal as I turn the work over and over looking for that answer.
Personal responses to art are subjective by every individual. We notice art, we learn about art history and world conditions present that may have influenced their creation. We take a personal interest in the artist and suppose upon meeting what we would say to them. Dialogues and questions bring us closer. This for me is certainly a joy as I learn to respond to people as they respond to my work. Thank you to all who share their thoughts with me and help me to expand on my own.
Tell us about the process you use to create your art
I approach art first and foremost with the awareness it is a process to build upon previous processes all the time pushing to reach something I can reflect upon as new. I don’t necessarily need instructions and yet I value the impact they provide. Learning how to do something is just as important as doing it for me and so I like to learn both ways. I have no difficulty parting with my work and meeting the public and valuing these interactions noting what they like and why does in part shape my work. It is thus well received by the public and for this I am fortunate.
The process of creating art begins with my own photographs. I purchased a Leica D-Lux camera and create my art from my photographs. I have used a few apps but find Procreate, iColorama and Art Set my favorites because I’m still learning to use them in new approaches.
I begin with a photograph and I’d like to stress that my camera already is a piece of art, capturing the moments I find and that alone is an adventure! When a particular photograph is chosen to further edit I want to retain a recognizable part. I have though furthered sometimes my photographs past the point of recognition, but there is always a sense in me to keep a part of it present.
Sometimes I work with complete silence and other times music fills me and the rhythms invade. Did you ever listen to music and feel the mood or happen to notice a steady feeling emerge inside. You might sing or hum the lyrics, you might change your mind about something or just plain out want to create. I turn it up and art joins in with that atmosphere. Amidst the fun is a deep sense of concentration.
If you could take only two of your images to a desert island, what would they be and why?
I think I would want to take writing, either my own response to my work or writing in regards to work I value intensely from other photographers. A long time ago as a student in grade school I wrote something and my teacher spoke highly of it to the class and then read it. Everyone applauded and the memory of this accolade makes me so happy. As a member of a photographic site I enjoy observing fellow photographers’ captures from all over the world, their particular approaches and choice of genres. There are written ways to respond to photographs, both technically and with a personal sense of what we see or sense within.
Ekphrastic writing is a written response to art forms that are non literary. Be it a painting or forms of dramatic performance, photographs that shake us into a sense of beauty, poignant eyes reaching out to us, buildings containing shadows and light in unexpected ways, the watery places that return us to our beginnings are all sources I want to learn how to write about. It is a testimonial to the nature of creative endeavors to bring one’s thoughts as a greeting, a hello to what has been shared. I want to say thank you this way and so I write. I want to respond.
Tell us about any memorable comments or responses you’ve had about your work.
I have received many comments, sometimes it is overwhelming and, especially in public settings, I feel like I’m on a stage. When I return home it is silence I seek. Being on stage is an amazing emotion and as an extrovert I gain energy this way. Silence/anonymity, though, is a form of regrouping for me as I reflect.
The comments I treasure the most are those that contain the brilliance of prose in creative forms that are personal paintings for my inner and outer world. They are joys!
Name three artists who inspire you. What is it about their work that resonates with you?
Working as an art educator in elementary classrooms, meeting the now and future artists, teaching and watching them use their newly found skills is an inspiration to my soul. They inspire me!
How do you think you’ve improved as an artist compared to when you first started?
Specifically, it’s easier to say it’s done. It’s easier to see how techniques build upon each other. There is also the notion that letting art rest before finishing sometimes is the answer. Sometimes stepping away from art altogether lets it blossom when one returns to it. Coming from a background in photography and utilizing this skill as a basis for my art encourages me to retain the light of photography within my work as it develops. I don’t always accomplish this idea and it continues to be a personal goal.
What advice would you give yourself if you could go back to when you started making art?
I think I always made art, the advice would contain, “Go girl, keep going!”
What devices/equipment and software do you use to create your art?
Currently, I use an iPad with an Apple Pencil, a Leica camera, Procreate, iColorama, music, Art Set, my fingers and eyes, and my imagination, of course. Sometimes I’ll ask my students, “Where is your imagination?” and they point to their heads. Yes, I agree and when you dance, one’s imagination goes into your legs and arms. When you play basketball or any sport, your imagination can take hold and help you to win.
As artists, our imaginations help us to see with new senses; to feel the nature of art, sometimes restless and bearing a burden of how to make it look the way we want it to become, and at other times the ‘flow’ of the journey to fruition.
Do you think digital/new media art is still not regarded as a valid form of art?
By some, because it has a fairly new history compared to other forms of art. Giving an object a name shapes our response to it, it gains familiarity and can be classified. We can visualize it by the word and thus it has a meaning. Art is always evolving, it is an inherent part of art to do this.
With regard to digital/new media art we the artists are the ones that give it validity each time it becomes for us the chosen method of expression. There are many artists who engage in this art medium, many people turned on to it and many people who find in digital/new media art a form that certainly is worthy of shared validity with other art mediums.
Personally, I have never sensed from the public a mindset that my art contains elements that are not up to par with other artistic materials. If I could go back in time and share digital art techniques with well known artists, would I do this. Oh yes, and I suspect they would be able to utilize in many new and creative ways these art materials.
What is most important then is that we as artists develop our styles and keep at it, the deeper in we go the more our art and the materials we use become not only acceptable but admirable. That is what we bring to strengthen the validity of digital art. Each of us grows a garden.
Susy Andrea Kamber
