Elaine Pratt
My Abstract Expressionist; digital photography compositions, oils and encaustics, are engendered by my responses to the world. Creating art for me is a highly focused meditative experience. From an early age, I was inspired by Turner, Frankenthaler, Van Gogh, Krasner and Rothko.
This series of original digital photography compositions have 30 - 100 layers of my original photos in Photoshop. As an artist most of my life, I’ve photographed millions of images. Now, using these textural, abstract photographs, I create art with nature as my paintbrush. I gravitate toward the dramatic interplay of light on; cloud formations, mountains, trees, plants, rocks, and ripples on water. Layered and masked in Photoshop, I can distort and use them for texture, color and shape. I have enjoying combining photographic imagery for my design clients every chance I got. A series of my earlier compositions from ‘84, in a piece I designed, are in the Smithsonian collection. Through abstract art, I embrace the happy accident. I let the image evolve and communicate to me as I push to have it communicate for me. There are many interpretations to my art as in a Rorschach test. My hope is that my art reaches, in the viewers mind, a place to connect with something in their subconscious that will bubble to the surface. With different environments and audiences my art will strike different chords.
