| Exhibition: RS.Artist@verizon.net |
As part my “paying” job as photographer for the social column in my local newspaper, I
found that my subjects often wanted to see their picture after I took it, almost as though
their own reality 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. And 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 Uelsmann-like worlds or 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 these
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; images which combine aspects that, in the world of film, would have been
characterized as BAD, with completely new possibilities applied until the image becomes
something new; reality unrecognizable.
found that my subjects often wanted to see their picture after I took it, almost as though
their own reality 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. And 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 Uelsmann-like worlds or 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 these
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; images which combine aspects that, in the world of film, would have been
characterized as BAD, with completely new possibilities applied until the image becomes
something new; reality unrecognizable.
| 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 |
- 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 |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
| | | | | | | | |
| Click on thumbnail to view full-size image |
