Angélique Droessaert Digital Art: These works represent a result of pushing my creativity with photography inspired by nature, and taking it further, using my vision and realizing it with state of the art digital technologies into very personal, unique, often abstract, artistic renditions.

I start from my photography or a series of my own photos and transform them into personal, emotionally felt compositions. I use my computer skills to manipulate the digital information contained in the record. As a result I no longer work with the original photograph, but create new, separate works. Through a series of steps, using various technologies, I create independent works of art. These processes involve many additional hours of working with the new digital "painting," using multiple softwares, repeat editing, and revisiting these transformations over time--sometimes over years. Some works have many layers of renditions, editions and transformations. I am sometimes surprising myself, when finally looking at a piece and saying "this is finished, I am happy now," ....and I look back and I worked with a photograph since 2006, or 2007...and now it is 2014! The years have passed, the technologies developed and I can do now what I could not realize in 2007! Of course, working in digital media is a never ending, and constant learning process, as our technologies become more sophisticated, and our abilities to handle larger files and deeper digital records are made easier with progress in technologies. My first DSLR , a Nikon D70 opened broader worlds to me than ever before, but I could not have done the type of sophisticated editing work I am doing in manipulating my digital records even three or four years ago... This kind of artistic creation is not for the faint of heart, and it takes quite a bit of financial resources to pull together custom built computer hardware and a variety of softwares to create my art work, not to mention lots of learning, reading manuals and, trial and error--- (!) to get to the point of being able to produce what I envision, not just on a screen somewhere in a digital file, but to produce it into physical reality, on canvass, or on or behind plexiglass, on stainless steel, and using the newest, latest art technologies.
I sometimes just look at my easel, my paintbrushes and my canvasses with longing--...sitting there...how much easier, simpler, faster, directer and much, much less costly that was for painting! ... It is challenging and wildly intoxicating to use todays new digital media and ride on the breaking wave of technological innnovations and its ensuing artistic possibilities, and continue developing and growing and adjusting with each improvement. Today I can create and conceptualize things I could not even dare to create just four or five years ago...I could envision them, certainly, but had not the means, the tools to execute them!

When paradigms shift, and a flurry of emerging technologies populate our formerly known environment, challenging and displacing people, tools, crafts, trades and attitudes into the insecurities of the unknown consequences, producing untried, unexperienced, unintended results, insecurities grow. A certain orthodoxy might make people feel safer for a while... to hold on to what is known, rather than be unhinged and unbalanced by the new and unknown. There are many psychological reasons why our brains and our bodies seek the comfort of the known versus the insecurities of the alien, foreign, weird, or unknown.

Changing ideals of beauty, thus new art and experimentation with new materials and artforms often is misunderstood initially, and under appreciated. Some of this art is later seen as masterfully prefiguring future developments and evolution, new modes of thinking in more areas than just art; some is seen as a break in the old and creating new directions for the future, new ways of seeing, experiencing and understanding.

Van Gogh was happy to sell his paintings for a few dinners, and Renoir felt he could not possibly marry and support a wife on the very little he was making till in his 40s--till he became accepted, reputable and sought out. And yet, when we think of how the impressionists were initially discredited and disparaged, we might understand a little more what might be going on today, not just in how our mind works, but the way of the world... and its attitudes. Ansel Adams photography and my fellow country man Eduard Steichen were not seen initially as great, or artists in their fields. Time will tell.... and it did. Without photography there would not have been something like the impressionists movement, away from the Academy! The emergence of photography not only as a record of portraits, events, landscapes and developing into an artform of its own, in a sense, liberated the artists from trying to have to render a likeness as recognizable, from being faithful to nature and reproducing the seen, and rather shift onto the sphere of the felt, the sensed, the intuited, the many layered realities of an object under various angles, lights and situations, and altered states of mind, and artistic history for ever, for example.

I think it is so with the emergence of digital art and the many possibilities it opens up for an artist to use computers as their medium to create a cerebral, artistic, uniquely inspired vision to be executed with craft and flair. I am strangely intrigued and fascinated with the DMT molecule in our brains and the opening up of the chakras into the highest forms of meditation, shedding bodily realities for a period--- to merge with a far vaster, more beautiful and more meaningful universe than most any can imagine, let alone see and experience, unless you are on a shamanic flight or take drugs. Or meditate and have a spiritual path---... An immersion into multiple realities and floating universes outside of time and space is a transformative experience that alters your sense of space and time and understanding forever.. The experience of this phenomenon has been scientifically researched in many studies, and documented. One mathematician likened it to a sort of fractal geometry effect, that a subject can experience in total immersion, of untold energy and beauty contained in the smallest part of their pineal gland to connect in a quantum leap to the vastness of all universes.

I find, that when I work on my works, immersing myself into the digitized records of my images and entering some rabbit hole or other, it sometimes has the effect on me of a feeling of Alice in Wonderland--it becomes a wild and crazy trip to dive into my computer and work in response as much as in impulse to create new works. Sometimes I have an idea, and in the end--my work comes out far better than I imagined it. And sometimes, I am taken aback by what happens on my screen after a certain algorithm was applied--and it is not at all what I expected would happen... but I continue to work with it, and it becomes this strange symbiosis of my brain seeking beauty and pleasure and my computer to manipulate the pixels leading to real surprises and new twists. My camera is a finely calibrated machine that records and writes with light, collecting in digital pixel form, information as to color, light, darkness and intensity. As an artist I then use this information. I create new works on my large computer screen of what I feel and see when I look at this image. I use a multi media approach and often create abstractions of landscapes and nature that inspired me originally.

This overall collection is called "Reflections" and is subdivided into several branches that I am actively working on: "Waterworks" defines the first part of the collection. The term 'Reflection' plays on its two key meanings: Mirroring reflection is one aspect, reflecting a visual image, or a color or an object, and where the varying gradations of the original merge into its reflection. The contemplation of these mirrored reflections lead me in turn to more reflections in my mind, reflections on truth, beauty, harmony, original and derivative, or reflected. An active engagement and concentration on the mind's reflection when it beholds and engages visual reflections leads to spiritual reflection on the meaning of life and death, understanding our world, seeing and beholding---and leads in higher realms of philosophy and spirituality. Very platonic indeed. The contemplation and reflection on beauty leads to higher insights.

My "Reflections" are a form of spiritual and artistic meditation from the natural, visually recognizable to a more abstract form of intellectual beauty, an interplay of energy, color and light.
This series in the collection is called 'Waterworks'