Presentation 6 // Digital Photography

Hello Uzbekistan! I'm Roz Dimon. I'm going to be the moderator today and we have three exciting artists joining us today at the American Makerspace in Karshi. We have Lee Day from New York City, Gregory Little from Ohio, and Lee Musgrave from Washington, all in the US. This is, I believe, the third presentation of our American Artist Talks.

Roz Dimon

Today's topic is Digital Photography, Image Capture to Artistic Production. Let's just get into it. Techspressionism at American Makerspace Karshi. We'll just say a little bit here about Techspressionism. This is the group that sponsored our trip, or that we are a part of, rather, when we recently showed in Uzbekistan in Ergenç at the Contemporary Art Museum. And just to tell you what it is, it's an artistic expression approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience. Now note, it's an artistic approach, not necessarily a style. You'll notice that all the artists in this group all have different styles. And they all have a very different kind of approach, which makes it very exciting. It's a global network community of artists working with technology.

Roz Dimon

We have monthly salons. We have a virtual co-working that is sponsored by Cynthia, who's here today, Cynthia Beth Rubin. That's kind of a fun way to work with people when you get a little lonely in your own studio and you want to work with other people who have similar, you know, sort of challenges and excitement with working with technology.

Roz Dimon

We've done several exhibitions, two in the U.S., and this is our third and first international exhibit that we did in Ergenç in Uzbekistan. You can see the URLs here and go to Techspressionism.com. Our tag on Instagram is shown here as well, and we'd love for you to join us. It would be great to have an Uzbek chapter. That would be wonderful. Just going to give you a little review. When we came this past September, 2025. I'm showing you a little bit of what we've done. We're showing you a picture of our poster for our exhibition. That's in front of the Contemporary Art Museum of Uzbekistan in Ergenç.

Roz Dimon

Here's a clip from the opening. And of course, we want to give a shout out to Sharon, who was just a wonderful person to work with. We really had a very exciting opening. It was just fun for everyone, and there was a lot of conversation and engagement. A really cool thing about this museum is it has a legacy of really very fun. Uzbek artists from Uzbekistan and Russian artists in their collection. So it was fun to have our piece be a very contemporary, new kind of thing, which Sharon has been bringing into that museum consistently. We've been so excited to be part of it. As we speak today, I just want to remind you that some of the software we'll be talking about, it may not be the software you're working in. I understand. I think that you're using mostly Microsoft products and other things.

Roz Dimon

But you'll notice that a lot of the software that we're working on is not the software that you're working on. But a lot of the tools are similar, and you can do them with your own software. So I hope it's inspiring to you. Like GIMP, that's a wonderful thing. Some of us are working in Procreate on our iPads. Things are changing really rapidly now, and there's just so much more access. So all these millions of brushes you can get in Photoshop, which is a heavy, delicious, wonderful program. But it's expensive, and it kind of has everything and even more so. But these smaller programs can do a lot of the things that you're working on. And these are things that Photoshop can do. And now we have new tools that also can make things bigger.

Roz Dimon

Like I'm trying to think of what the software is, but it takes things and interpolates the pixels. So if you have a small image, you can make it large. Let's go into it. Digital photography from image capture to artistic production. I'm going to introduce us again real quickly. I'm Roz, the moderator. We have Lee Day, Gregory Little, and Lee Musgrave. They're presenting today.

Roz Dimon

Just telling you a little about myself. I did not go the academic route. I could have taught the programs at that time in certain schools like Pratt. And I was called in to start the first new media department at Deloitte downtown at the World Trade Center. And I found this whole corporate arena really fascinating, and I loved it. And I got a lot of the tools I needed. I'm not going to go over everything that you can read here. But basically, you know, my continued schooling was heading up new media departments for Deloitte. And I worked at American Express. I was at the Wall Street Journal in a very exciting position. And also doing my fine art late at night when I get home. But I had so much great equipment because I was working inside corporate America that was really just getting hold of this equipment.

Roz Dimon

Yeah, my theme is always American culture, Wall Street, Coca-Cola, Abraham Lincoln. I'm in several collections of distinction. I would say the 9-11 Memorial Museum and recently the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Museum that has 12 of my digital pieces. And of course, very excited to be part of Camus' collection.

Roz Dimon

Photography. It's funny. I'm kind of speaking as a painter who uses photography in my work. But just a quick overview here of the basics. You know, it began in the early 19th century. It was a huge breakthrough. Where all of a sudden, I mean, you know, in Paris in the 17th century, all you could see was paintings in people's homes. Everybody had ten paintings, you know, in the 17th century in their house. Because that was the recording of the moment and of the time for many, many years. So it was very revolutionary because for the first time, images could be captured mechanically, not just hand drawn with a brush or a pen.

Roz Dimon

So this was a really big deal. And people challenged it. Saying, oh, is this real? Is this art? Just like we're kind of going through today. Like digital art. Is this art? It sure is. And it's very exciting. But it's always, you know, you look at this and go, is this art? It's just a recording of reality. Well, you can see from these beautiful images here shown that it's not just what's going on but how that artist frames it. And the fact that their eyes said, let's capture this at this moment. The artist is always bringing something to it. And of course, the dark room has changed to be a new whole editing system that is totally different. That the accomplished people today will be talking to. I've just put up a quote here. But basically what it says is the digital age, I feel, brings painting back into ascendance.

Roz Dimon

At the same time, I'm acknowledging that using a digital brush, I am often loading my brush with photography along with text lines, graphics, lots of other things. And I'm loading it in a way that it's like a painting becomes like a video in z space. I mean, in x, y, z space. For a new kind of imaginative storytelling.

Roz Dimon

Just showing a quick piece of one of my recent football images. You can see that there are certainly there's photography in here. But I'm really using it to make a painterly kind of composition here. I also often put the toolbox in my paintings to show kind of the consciousness of the moment. And on the right is one of my digital Lincolns where you can go inside that QR code. The QR code is a little bit different. But it's something I've actually shown at one of my galleries as an artwork on its own. I mean, they're everywhere. So kind of making a funny conceptual statement about it. But also when you go into that, you can see this drawing above drawn one mark at a time. So it animates the drawing.

Roz Dimon

So I'm basically painting with photography in a lot of my work. Just showing you that one of my most innovative things I've done are these pieces I call diamondscapes. After 30 years. I do name it after myself. It was something it combines custom coded software with Photoshop and layers, layers and layers and layers that make a story across time. This is a diamondscape that I'm just showing you all these different items that I photograph and then place into the painting. And they're in different opacities. And the code allows people to go inside the painting and go through it. I'll let you just look at it. Listen to this real quick.

Roz Dimon

Young girl. What are you looking for? Oh, yeah, the document. Exactly. Oh, yes, exactly. So the piece is on the wall as a still image, a 2D image. But she's going deep inside its space on her iPad. And the things that she's pointing to come up 100%. And she can play the whole thing as a story, 300 years of history as well. And it has audio.

There we go.

It's easier to find the American flag, I think.

I was looking for the one where it was the guy in the other arms because that was one of the things.

Oh. Yeah. Oh, the wheel. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, you got that one. Definitely got that one.

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. You can also pause it if you want time to look at it.

She was great. When we had the opening for this, she wanted to do it. And then she got a little stage fright. She's about six years old. Anyway. I'm just showing you a screenshot of where I'm working in Photoshop. I'm sometimes working in hundreds, even thousands of layers. In this case, this painting was about 300 years of history. It was a commissioned work. It's on permanent display in Shelter Island at the History Museum.

Roz Dimon

And I have several in Long Island that are on permanent display. But you can see all the different brush options I have. And, you know, a lot of people don't love working in digital because you just have so many different options. I mean, I love it. But the layering you can really see here. And now let's get on to our main presenters today.

Roz Dimon

Want to introduce Lee Day, very talented artist working with photography. He was educated in photojournalism at the SI Newhouse School of Public Communications in Syracuse. His work years have been in creative art and tech. In photojournalism, art and stock photography. Programming, web design. He's a novelist. A tech consultant. A coder. And he's done art installation and fabrication.

Roz Dimon

His current focus is investigating the framework of algorithmic consciousness using digital photography. And so now I turn you over to Lee Day.

Thank you, Roz. Hi, I'm Lee Day. You can find my work at LeeDay.photography online. And at LeeDay.photography.com. And I actually am a photographer primarily. So what I'm interested in is the question of what do algorithms see? Artificial intelligence isn't human. So what do they actually see? So maybe this is what they're seeing.

Lee Day

.

…

. All the images I'm showing you were compiled by my iPhone, by the algorithms powering its various photographic functions. For me, the iPhone is both a photographic tool and a kind of artificial intelligence, which I use in observing this world. I started these stutter stitch panoramas 10 years ago, actually using an iPhone 5. The process begins on a train or perhaps a bus sometimes. I take my iPhones to the window and record the city as it rushes past using camera's panorama function.

Lee Day

This functionality was designed for a still world. So when I drag it through moving urban spaces, it struggles and has a hard time piecing together coherent photographic images. Instead, it assembles these stitched together creations. It mixes fragments from different places and different moments of time into a single image.

Lee Day

And this is what excited me when I first saw these images. I felt like this was a new way of seeing. It was the algorithmic view of the world. So I did these panoramic images for years. I see them as traditional style cityscapes from an algorithmic perspective. I love the way they are sometimes lyrical, sometimes poetic, yet often fractured.

Lee Day

It can be a very strange contrast. When I'm shooting these panoramas, I work for hours. Actually for days. I shoot thousands of photos of a particular place. For example, I got over 8,500 images when shooting in Japan for 10 days. And looking through this mass and massive images led me to another project which is called Train Pan Matrix where I create these large scale documentation pieces. For these I focus on a city, Tokyo for example, and use an application I programmed in processing. Processing to assemble my images into a giant visual array. Here are thousands of cityscapes sequenced and stacked up until they blur into something vast and strange.

Lee Day

From afar, the image becomes a pattern, landscape, memory, a database. On the other hand, if you get up close and look into the detail, you can find half of Tokyo documented within the images. Imagine that this is what it might look like inside the algorithm of mind. That's what I imagine, at least.

Lee Day

After I've been working on this project for some years, I noticed that there was another kind of image that I could pull from all these photos that I generate. And I think of these images as clippings. They're square and they're more compressed. So these new images felt to me more like fleeting impressions, a moment that, for a human, would just flash by and be gone before you really saw it. But for the algorithmic eye, it's frozen within the digital fabric of its memory. I call these images clippings.

Lee Day

These clippings are not literal records of a place. I imagine them as the algorithm's attempt to make sense of what it's seen. But to the algorithmic eye, the world is abbreviated. It's compressed, notational and rendered as gestures. Gestures that recall a subject of the moment without embedding the fullness of it.

Lee Day

Finally, you might ask why. Why do I care or how or what an AI sees? Well, first, because we're paired with our technology like never before. We swim in a sea of algorithmically mediated expressions from Instagram to TikTok to ChatGPT to who knows what else next. And fundamentally, I see these images as an expression of the world I'm living in. I feel the compression of time and space that is manifest in these images where things are just moving too, too fast and I'm struggling to keep up. And I'm looking to express the disjointed quality of life at a time when the algorithm has become the arbiter of human experience, of human performance, I guess of humanity, period.

Lee Day

And that's about it. That's about it.

Thank you, Lee. That was fabulous. Thank you. Really interesting imagery. There is no doubt we are in an age of a visual revolution of which all of us are part. And let's go on forward to our next artist. Gregory Little from Oberlin, Ohio. Gregory studied at the MFA Yale School of Art, Yale University. Then he went on to Indiana School of Fine Art in Indiana, educated in painting and drawing. He's taught in digital art and fine art. He's the founding director for the Iris Lab for Virtual and Augmented Reality Development in Ohio at the Lorain County Community College. He is a professor. Emeritus there, digital art and studio art. He's taught at community colleges, private colleges, state universities, and the Ivy League in the US and Italy. His studio practice work cycles between traditional and digital processes to investigate poetic interpretations of science.

Roz Dimon

He has exhibited and presented his work in the USA and internationally, including Uzbekistan.

Hey, everyone. Thank you for inviting us here. And I'm very happy to hear about your new makerspace. And today I'd like to talk to you about alternative uses of photography as reality capture. This work, which you're seeing here, are a series of small prints. They are on exhibit at Samaricand Art Station and were previously exhibited at CAMUS with the expressionist artists, but none of those works involve photography. But there are two other bodies of work that I'm working on that do involve photography that I'd like to speak with you about today. Yes, I'm working on three bodies of work at once. That is not abnormal for me, nor is it abnormal to be working in three different completely different mediums at once.

Gregory Little

But I do have two bodies of work that I'm going to show you pieces of today. They're all in process that explore the use of reality capture as 3D photography. So what is reality capture or 3D photography? Reality capture is around you all the time. All you have to do is think of medical imaging like CAT scans, like sonograms, MRIs, also stereo photography, the old school with the right eye, left eye image, photogrammetry and LIDAR, which are ways of combining depth positions with photography to create very three dimensional and very realistic looking imagery. And also drone photography is another. So this is a series of six pieces that I've been working on for quite some time. I manage at this point to produce about one of these per year. They're large scale digital prints on canvas. And in these then the series, I'm working with all sorts of forms of scientific imaging.

Gregory Little

Much of it is reality capture, like these NASA photographs from the Mars Voyager. I also combine symmetrical sacred kinds of compositions with alchemic images, images from outer space, images from inner space, images from the news media, all kind of happening at once, kind of simultaneously. This one is interesting for me because this is the first one that I actually painted on after printing and stretching.

Gregory Little

It just didn't work. So I needed to fix it. These are close ups of some of the imagery in the piece. I also work with LIDAR scans. LIDAR scans are a usually handheld device that combines laser laser beams to position models, 3D objects and photography from a camera lens that is specifically aligned with the point cloud. So this is the laser laser beam that is produced by the laser. So here you see the 3D model in all in white. Then you see the imagery. This is called a UV map. And then you see the results where the photography and the laser point cloud are combined to produce a photo realistic image.

Gregory Little

Whilst looking for more examples of 3D scanning, I stumbled across on, I believe it was SketchUp. I stumbled across this project that's happening in the Ukraine where a number of citizens are using handheld scanners, 3D scanners to scan war crimes. There's actually this online museum of war in Ukraine, whose mission it is, as you can see here, to create a digital archive of the consequences of war and to keep that in people's minds.

Gregory Little

This is a private home in Ukraine. This would be the home of, I think his name was Grigory, who was a retired factory worker. And this is a 3D model. You can go through that space and look at things from the back, the front. Here's another example of a kindergarten classroom in Ukraine that was captured on with an iPhone 12 Pro.

Gregory Little

All the pro versions of the iPhone have LIDAR scanners in them. I put a lot of these scans together using Maya and Unity 3D and placed them in our virtual reality cave, created a kind of flashlight for them, did some programming to get all this to work. And they're very spooky, very disturbing spaces to wander around in. I wanted to give some kind of context to them and add some twist. So I began looking at 3D scans of people. These are sold online. And generally to gaming companies, to game creators. So here I Googled businessmen checking their phones and watches. And then I combined them with this image.

Gregory Little

These scans from the Ukraine of automobiles and trucks all smashed up at the bottom, a hotel. Here's another one I call Field Trip, where I was able to find a group of 3D scans of schoolchildren. So these are actually these are actually the children. These are these are not 3D modeled or created. These are these are reality. This is the form of reality capture. So here's another one called Field Trip.

Gregory Little

And this one is called Happy Hour. And it's kind of about how we just keep going on in the face of all these problems and how those of us. We live in the third and the first world are kind of distant from all this, at least for now. So here is a list of the attributions of these 3D scans that I've that I've used. Made you some. And so I hope you get a chance to check that out. And congratulations on your new maker space. I hope you have a great time.

Thank you.

Hello, I'm artist Lee Musgrave. I'm here in my studio in Washington State, USA. And I'm going to talk to you today about how to convert photography into Techspressionism paintings. I start by collecting ephemera from all over the world. I go walking, hiking, I gather it up, people give it to me, I bring it home, I sort through it, and I start making selections and I put those on my work table and start playing with the composition.

Lee Musgrave

Moving things around, checking them for intensity, texture. Oh, I love it. All sorts of things start to speak to me. I really listen to them. There's a broken piece of taillight, for example. This piece you may recognize. This is the electrical diagram for a keyboard for your computer. I found this on the cobblestones in front of Cologne Cathedral in Cologne, Germany. It's part of this print, which is in the Uzbekistan exhibit.

Lee Musgrave

In other words, trash is usually just thrown away. But I see it as a treasure, a very strong treasure for artists to use. Once I've played with this composition, I may then start to play with the lighting from the light box, from lamps. I have several of them here in the studio. I even use a flashlight on occasion. Just depends on what it tells me that I'm looking at. Once that is done, and I'm happy with it, I then take my camera, which is an old Nikon D3100.

Lee Musgrave

It's about 10 years old. I photograph it from several different angles. I may take something out. I may add something else in. I may rearrange things and take some more photographs. Once I'm finished with that, I download the photographs into my computer. And this is where the transition starts. I use the Microsoft Photo program, Microsoft Paint, and a separate program called Paint.net.

Lee Musgrave

Those three programs enable me to turn the ephemera into a painting. So let's take a look at how that works. This is a photograph of staged ephemera. Bits and pieces of plastic, paper, wire, etc. Note that the background is a flat white color. Now this image is the Techspressionism conversion. You can't identify any of the objects and the background now looks like impasto paint. Everything suggests exploiting energy. And I love it. Some combinations of staged ephemera manifest an aura of sacredness. Every spiritual feeling holds at its center not an answer but a question, which nurtures something fleeting like a blue rose.

Lee Musgrave

All artists are absorbed in their own inner worlds, infused with psychological complexity, echoing the isolation of contemporary life. Even with instant human contact via the internet, via the world wide web, this solitude creates subconscious psychic tension. This abstract Techspressionism painting addresses this dreamlike suspended time while acknowledging the lifelike energy of computer technology.

Lee Musgrave

Some staged compositions cause me to react in a compulsive manner that results in extreme use of light and or color to ignite the balance between tension and harmony. I'm often asked how the titles of my paintings connect with the image. Well, during the creative process, I keep myself open to subconscious influences, including random words.

Lee Musgrave

Entwined kept popping up in my mind while making this painting. This interaction of lines and forms, and the! stems from my early career creating Finnish fetish and light and space art in Los Angeles. The impeccable finish of the lines, curves and planes suggests a world that seems to be merging with the viewer's space while speaking to abstract illusionism to fool your eyes and bend one's mind. This last painting is an invitation and recognition of our shared vulnerability. It extends my hand in asking you to step into my shoes and experience the world through my deeply personal relationship with art. It is an invitation to look beyond the surface, to embrace the unknown, and to find your own grace within the vibrant chaos of the world. Thank you for your interest in my art.

Thank you, Lee. That was excellent. This is how you can reach Lee. He is on his website and also on Instagram. We want to thank everyone again at the American Makerspace Karshi and CAMUS, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Urgent. I just want to remind you that upcoming sessions are listed here. And we're looking forward to hearing from all the artists in those sessions. Thank you again. And we're going to open up to Q&A here. And I'm going to... Should I stop the share, do you think, Cynthia? Or... Yeah, stop the share. And thank you again. And congratulations to the presenters. That was really excellent.

So, and in case people don't know what Q&A is, it's a question period. It's our time to hear from you, the people in Uzbekistan. Thank you. We need... You need to unmute. Yes. Thank you. Okay. Yeah. Few more three minutes like we just disconnected my... Like our computer like went down. Does anybody there have any questions?

Unattributed

Or did we lose the audience when that happened? I closed. I think we have no questions here.

Well, yeah, I can, I might bring up some questions myself for the artists and you can listen in and if you have further questions, you can add to it. I'll start with Lee Day. Do you create these images in Photoshop, I mean you said that the iPhone creates your photographs. How does it do that? I mean, if you can explain that a little bit more.

And how, yeah. So, so the iPhone does actually create all the images, sort of looks like they're put together by me and Photoshop but that's not what happens so the way the iPhone panorama function works is it takes sort of hundred pixel wide strips, and then the, the genius brain in there tries to stick them all together into a beautiful picture. And so it's a beautiful panorama, but because it's flying through space it, you know, I don't know 100 kilometers an hour or something. It really struggles and it can't put them together properly. And so that's why you get these stitched together kinds of looks. So, the images are entirely created by the, by the iPhone and that's why I think of them as being sort of a proxy for algorithmic intelligence because they are actually created by algorithms, or at least assembled by algorithms.

And yet your artists I there's some I that's in that in those pieces that are distinctly yours.

Well, I, you know, it's sort of a collaboration because what my, my contribution is more of a curatorial or curationist perspective I go through, like I said thousands of images, looking for those moments for the panoramas that work and so there's, you know, there's very much a cure, I'm going through and adding my eye. I'm going through and adding my eye. I'm going through and adding my eye. And so, I think that's a really good way to kind of connect to what the iPhone has created. And so, I think that's a really good way to connect to what

The iPhone has created. Great, great. You know something that I think is pervasive for all of us is there's, there's so many decisions you have so many options with digital media. Some people working in it just, they can't, they can't make a choice you know so it's, I mean at least for many of us I think it's a medium that expresses our time distinctly.

Roz Dimon

And you really, it can. I think if people think digital working in digital is easy it certainly isn't. I'm Greg. Can you talk a little bit about your process. You know I see your MFA is in painting, you know why do you bring technology into your work and maybe tell us a little more about your process. Sure.

I first. Well I found myself in the, in the mid to late 80s. Working on paintings and trying to accomplish certain effects and juxtapositions that were proving to be very difficult and the paintings began to have too many layers and I couldn't quite sort it out and I. And also my, my mind was moving very fast. Lots of images being generated lots of ideas coming up and the painting process was so slow at the time because I was trying to figure out these difficult technical things that I didn't know how to do. And I realized that the computer was kind of a relief, kind of allowed me to make things a little more quickly almost as quickly as I could think once I figured out the software, and allowed me to do to combine photographs and very fine lines and, you know, lots of and try out multiple color combinations really quickly which would, you know, take forever if I was changing the painting completely so it, it kind of freed, you know, kind of freed my process.

Gregory Little

And I think that's what I'm trying to do. Yeah. We could say that, you know, like the, the act of reproducing an image and turning a painting into a free floating image kind of frees the image, it kind of allows it to float between different mediums and I liked that at the time. Recently, though, I have.

Gregory Little

Well, I found myself painting on one of my prints, a large print on canvas actually that blue one that I showed you. I added a little bit of color. And after printing it and stretching it and looking at it for a couple days I thought, it doesn't work, but it worked on the screen that the screen was so small, compared to the size of the painting which is seven feet wide.

Gregory Little

So, I began painting on it and that changed things to, I missed the surface of a painting the texture of a painting, the physicality, the grounding quality of the painting and so now I do my best to work back and forth between them.

That brings up some. Thank you. Thank you that brings up a lot of interesting concepts. I think for a lot of us working in this medium. I know for myself that my paintings just filled up with squares in New York City these electronic squares and montages of information and I

Had to

Have the computer, it would and you know it was challenging I never thought I'd put down that other brush you know. And it also brings up elements of consciousness. That I think Lee tackles I mean. I mean, his work is so fast, but it's sort of, it's to me representative of humanity right now, just barely struggling to keep up with our inventions, you know, if you want to speak to that a minute. Well,

I definitely feel like we're living this soup of, as I said, of all kinds of different technologies and they, it feels like they're in our bloodstream in many ways. I mean, that's what, there's a lot of litigation or countries are trying to change the way that we interact with everything from AI. So, I don't know, I think it's a crazy time. It's a very interesting time to be alive. You know, it's sort of a new technological revolution. And where we end up, who knows exactly, but it's interesting. I guess young people in Korshi will be really on the, much more on the cutting edge of that than we will be, frankly.

Oh, I agree. Yeah, we're going to, we're going to be the old dinosaurs soon, but it's been exciting to be in the forefront of it, actually. Lee Musgrave, that brings up a question, Lee. What is your primary objective, like when you throw all the things in the air and you kind of allow it to fall? Does that get into that question about consciousness that you're trying to bring into the painting? I mean, I sometimes leave the toolbar and things in the painting to kind of show that I'm right there in this medium, using this medium. So, can you talk to that a little bit?

Well, I'm sure you're aware that taking advantage of chance is a time-honored process in the arts and sciences. What I like about it is that it gets you right to the edge. Instantly. And it gives you insights into things that you may not have thought about at all. Suddenly there's a composition in front of you that you had nothing to do with and how the light goes through and around all of those objects. You had nothing to do with. It all happened by chance. And that just brings all my senses to a real roar.

Lee Musgrave

And I love that kind of energy and I love that challenge of finding the grace within the chaos.

Oh, that's wonderful. You know, we talked about the camera eye as such a revolutionary thing, the eye of the camera, but I still argue for the eye of the artist. Because even if you throw something or, you know, even when I worked in oil on canvas, I'd put something down and I'd go, ooh, I like that, you know. And it's still you making it. You're making decisions about things in

Tandem with what you do.

Well,

Yeah. The wonderful thing about it is it's instant, too. If I can see something there that I don't like, I think, doesn't appeal to me, so I can just pick it off and throw it away. It's gone instantly. Or I can just shuffle it around and it takes on a whole new look and the challenge starts all over again. It's addictive. That's the word.

Yeah. Yeah. And the technology is always changing. Yeah. You know, all the time. So it's a good way to keep your mind sharp, but a little fatiguing at times. It brings up maybe as a final thing to talk about a little is, you know, what do we miss about the good old days of painting or do you want to go back to that? I know for myself, I actually just bought 100 little canvas squares that are an inch wide, and I'll be doing maybe my first painting after 20 years with oil on canvas. And as someone said who's watched me. I work all along said, well, it's not going to be painting the same way you did because our minds and our lives have been so changed by this technology that I don't know. But I'm just looking forward to, you know, we get obsessed with the technology. And yet as some another friend of mine from Smithsonian, Paul Trackman, he's an artist now retired.

Roz Dimon

But he said he said, you know, when you look at an oil painting, there's thousands of layers in a little oil painting. You know, there's lots of stuff going on in there. So anyway, maybe I don't know who wants to talk.

You know, that goes back, you know, the technology influencing painting or art, you know, goes back to Durer and, you know, they got from photography strictly from photography's point of view. So but, you know, frankly, I've never put paint on a canvas. So for me, I mean, I think the question I have for the other artists here is, is what is it about photography that makes it so important that you want to incorporate that into your paintings? Why is it somehow a special thing that you use rather than painting?

Lee Day

I think Greg answered that a little bit before. You know, there is a time constraint. But I know from my perspective, I think there's also a reality lock to photography that, you know, painting starts off with a blank slate basically.

Whereas a photograph.

Yeah. You start with a full world. So photography is essentially reductive. And you get back to good old Cartier-Bresson about the decisive moment. It's all about the moment. You were looking at those pictures of Eisenstadt or Dorothea Lange, where the reason those images are such such powerful as they captured that moment. And the person saw that moment while they were capturing it. And so I think that's sort of the power of photography. It's actually connected to the world. And you see that in Raza. You see that in Raza's pictures. You see that in Greg's as well. You know, with these moments, the planets and everything. And I think there were people floating by in some of those strips, which I found really fascinating.

Can I just interrupt for a second, make sure that we don't have any questions, because we have a loyal person in Uzbekistan right now. We appreciate you. Do you have any comments? People in... Karshi? Are you using photography? What's up, everyone? I think it's okay. Do you use photography to make art or are you photographers?

Unattributed

Actually, my name is Ndufar, by the way. And I'm also really interested in photography and art. So sometimes I'm interested in photography. Sometimes I use the, let's say, the different kind of apps to create my pictures with using the photography, as you mentioned it. And actually, that's why at the first point I was, let's say, interested because I researched all the people here from Instagram. I saw your picture. I mean, all people's pictures and things. Then I think, like, I feel like it was cool. Yeah. I mean, when it comes to talking about the specific answer to your question, yeah, I love photography and art. That's why I practice sometimes. Yeah. Okay. Wonderful. Hope we get to see some of your work sometime.

Unattributed

Yeah. Hopefully. Yeah. Did you get new ideas today? Was there something special that... Yeah. Actually, there was a kind of pictures, like, in some kind of drawing. Yeah. Like, Chinese, probably, in China. And I was curious because it was a kind of picture one, sure, that I saw in a presentation that there was a kind of, what I think, with the Chinese word. And there were people who are working. And that's going... I thought about the one bazaar in Kashi. There is one bazaar in Kashi. I thought it's kind of similar. Yeah.

Unattributed

Yeah. It was actually the... It's a mix and plenty and amazing thing. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. That would have been Lee's work in Tokyo, I believe. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It was...

But in many ways, it's the same thing all over the world. But one of the things I found in... Because I use basically a process for taking them in is every different location, so Tokyo, Kashi, or other places, they all have a different feel to them. The space... The place imposes a different something onto the individual individual. So I think that's what you're trying to do.

It's not like you're trying to say, like, it's not a varioy. Something interesting, I mean it's kept, let's say, catching my attention quickly, because at the same time I was interested in the pictures, especially from the Earth and different, let's say, galaxies and planets. Yeah, it was also cool at the same time with the joking pictures. Yeah.

Unattributed

So, sorry, back to you, Roz. No, that's great.

Thank you. Thank you for your input and you know we're all open about sharing our work and we'd love to hear from you and you. There will be a recording that you can access of course but you can find us on Instagram and in other means or on Twitter. You can email us from our websites and you know I know I personally would love to see what, what all of you come up with your, your the next generation and it's exciting to be here and we thank you again and look forward to the next session and also hearing more from you so don't be too shy. I didn't, I was so shy I could barely talk when I was little, I, everything about art, but I have definitely learned to talk.

Somehow hard to believe.

I know. Thank you. I can't believe it. But once you find your, your, your home and who you are, then it gets easier and you know, it's great to ask the questions are to ask the questions so you can always keep that dialogue going. Thank you again everyone.

So yeah, we're right at the hour just about I just wanted to ask our. I'm sorry what was your name again could you put it maybe. Tell us your name again. There are two of you there. Do you have Instagram accounts. Can you. Yes, actually, my name is Dita fire of us. You can also use my Instagram and with its name, and I also followed the, the leaf, also, you know, Mr. B also from Instagram, and I also. So the pictures on there. Yeah. Okay, so if you follow us or you can follow.

Unattributed

Expressionism on Instagram, then we can follow back and see what you're doing because. Really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay.

Okay. And anyone out there's someone sitting behind you just. Do you have any questions or work. Set here. No more questions. Okay. Great. Okay. So, so you're going to sign us off. So.

Thank you everyone. Thanks. Have a beautiful day wherever you are in the world.

Yes, thank you.

Keep hope alive and keep creating.

Bye-bye.

Thank you. Bye. We're signing off. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye.