photo by Jim Kapsalis
Soft pastel on original digital print, 12.5" x 12.5"
I like to print some of my more meditative digital paintings on watercolor paper, then hand color/alter them with soft pastels. This is a manipulated fractal composed with an old frac-generator a friend of mine wrote in the '80s as a senior project at UCLA. Don't know if anyone else has a copy of this little program--I call it Kathy-Frak. Anyway, I printed it on an Epson R-3000 using archival ink on Epson watercolor paper, (cold press, gsm 240). The original was a pale duo-chrome ochre-sepia print. Then I broke out a Unison pastel set of earth tones and went to town. I like the contrast of high- and low-tech rendering in this piece: the very deliberate mathematical fractal image and the loose-wristed fragile stick of pastel meeting on paper. I love this bashing of methods, these materials, this freedom. My life is good.