| Exhibition: RS.Artist@verizon.net |
As part my “paying” job as a social photographer, I found that my subjects often wanted
to see their picture after I took it, almost as though their own reality of the moment were
only complete once they had been documented. With the omnipresence of digital
photography, it seems everyone carries a camera in their pocket furiously documenting
their lives and spreading those photographs around the internet to substantiate their
existence.
With digital photography comes the photo editing software. Previously difficult and
painstaking dark-room manipulations are made at the click of a mouse. Where it is often
thought that photographers are among the most honest of artists because of the
documentary aspect of their medium, now even the most rank amateur can produce
photographic textures and surfaces which used to take hours to achieve in the dark-room.
It is in this world of photo manipulations that I have lately found my creative juices
flowing. That our reality is so tied to photographs and that that reality is so easily
changed into fantasy is one of the wonders I immerse myself into when I work. Another is
that this digital world, completely made up of discrete pixels, when enlarged to 57” x 80”,
becomes intensely pure. When Mondrian was looking for the purest form of imagery, he
would have loved the world of pixels! I revel in the textures and values and colors and
lines peculiar to the digital world, all formed by tiny little squares even smaller than the
tesserae of mosaics. These odd and rich characteristics come together to make odd and
rich images, all from a camera and a computer. These images combine aspects that, in
the world of film, would have been characterized as bad. With these new possibilities
applied to an image until it becomes something new (a reality unrecognizable) the worlds
created in my computer take life and reflect modern reality when placed upon an exhibit
wall.
to see their picture after I took it, almost as though their own reality of the moment were
only complete once they had been documented. With the omnipresence of digital
photography, it seems everyone carries a camera in their pocket furiously documenting
their lives and spreading those photographs around the internet to substantiate their
existence.
With digital photography comes the photo editing software. Previously difficult and
painstaking dark-room manipulations are made at the click of a mouse. Where it is often
thought that photographers are among the most honest of artists because of the
documentary aspect of their medium, now even the most rank amateur can produce
photographic textures and surfaces which used to take hours to achieve in the dark-room.
It is in this world of photo manipulations that I have lately found my creative juices
flowing. That our reality is so tied to photographs and that that reality is so easily
changed into fantasy is one of the wonders I immerse myself into when I work. Another is
that this digital world, completely made up of discrete pixels, when enlarged to 57” x 80”,
becomes intensely pure. When Mondrian was looking for the purest form of imagery, he
would have loved the world of pixels! I revel in the textures and values and colors and
lines peculiar to the digital world, all formed by tiny little squares even smaller than the
tesserae of mosaics. These odd and rich characteristics come together to make odd and
rich images, all from a camera and a computer. These images combine aspects that, in
the world of film, would have been characterized as bad. With these new possibilities
applied to an image until it becomes something new (a reality unrecognizable) the worlds
created in my computer take life and reflect modern reality when placed upon an exhibit
wall.
| A self-employed artist, Schofield is an arts activist, a community activist and a social butterfly, having been one of 14 founders of the first all-women Krewe in Tampa. She is past Regent of the Tampa Chapter of DAR and is serving the Florida State Society as Curator. Schofield also holds a private-pilot's license. |
| About the Artist |
| Critic's Comments |
- The show has splashes of exuberance. Roberta Schofield of Tampa has a work called
Running ... The colors collide in ways that nature tends to avoid - pink becomes green,
purple becomes orange. It's arresting to say the least.
- Schofield ... in her exploration of nonlinear architectural space, arrived at a
contemporary metaphor for the simultaneous nature of past and present in our
memories.
- ... the ultimate result is very satisfying, as your mind attempts to place the elements in
her work into a logical presentation that refuses to stay static. She has managed to
bring classic settings into moving contemporary scenes that please and satisfy the soul.
- ...conveys empty architectural spaces with uncommon and often unsettling force. With
perspective frequently askew and lighting definitely mysterious, Schofield's paintings
are, in effect, stage settings crying out for people to come running into them.
- Roberta Schofield’s Solar Shift was a deserved Best of Show winner, a flattened, airy
landscape of color blocks David Hockney could love.
- Abandoning reality as touchstone, her imagined DeChirico-like structures speak of
order over chaos and childhood fascination with the formal logic of early Italian
reproductions...
- Her current group of enigmatic landscapes and interiors - largely diptychs and
triptychs filled with optical illusions - alters perspective as dramatically as did the
cubists 80 years ago ...
Statement & Comments
| R. Schofield |
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