Between Heaven and Earth: Blue Hour: Sign
     
One of the great advantages of working with the computer is to be provided with an inexhaustible, creative potential, and I love to get inspired by using some forms and filters, and to find my subjects in a playful way. That means - like the surrealists and some abstractionists in the early nineteen-hundreds - I prefer to utilize Automatism for my creative processes in order to release my inner pictures.

Max Ernst, one of the leading surrealists said, "...the lack of a picture on an empty sheet can only be forced by developing a mechanism of poetical inspiration." An impressing series of Frottages (since 1925) witnesses the characteristic interaction between technique and inspiration. The great expressionist Paul Klee, who also preferred the techniques of Automatism, said, "Art doesn't reflect the visible. ART MAKES VISIBLE."

Working in this tradition, I usually generate a series of inspiring and associative organic shapes on transpararent layers and rework and combine it to form subtle arrangements of glowing transparent areas of colours by including the light behind it.

I generated the ingredients for "Sign," "Blue Hour," "Rapture of the Deep," and "Between Heaven and Earth" with a fractal program (KPT5 FraxFlames). These fractals look like real natural phenomena and organic structures, but unlike anything you've ever seen. They are a sort of ethereal forms, like crystal clouds, and they are very inspiring.

Although I've saved hundreds of presets and my own settings for colour scheme and rendering methods to get started with, the generating of Flames is only a first step. This first step may be by chance, but with the choice of some structures and patterns, I have already a real idea of the subject I would like to illustrate.

It needs a lot of reworking to realize this idea and to get an artwork with visibly painterly qualities. Usually I work with the whole palette of filters and tools provided in Photoshop to work it out and I also add paintings, if necessary. For paintings, correcting forms, lines and shades of colours, I use Painter 7.0 and a pressure-sensitive Intuos Pen on a Wacom Graphic Tablet.

 

 
Karin Kuhlmann (1948) studied photography and graphic design before spending 25 years as a commercial artist in the advertising industry, and has lived all her life in the North Rhine Westfalia region of Germany. With the entry of computers into her work in 1994, she soon discovered the creative potential presented by this new artistic tool for again taking up her original passions for the still-image as art, and meandered rapidly toward the abstract and the mathematical. In 2000, she launched her own Web site (http://www.karinkuhlmann.de) and the rest is digital-imaging history. Her works have become primary resource materials for students and teachers from all over the world working on anything from homework, essays, lectures, and term papers through to dissertations on computer graphics or a digital artist. Some of her works now illustrate chapters on new art, new media, hypermedia communication, mathematics, and fractals in several educational programs and schoolbooks. She has been awarded all over the globe for her imaging, and her works have been exhibited in numerous different countries. She has also been featured with her works in several cutting-edge specialist publications over the past few years, most recently including "IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications" (USA), and "Idea Graphics and Design" (Taiwan). Karin also occasionally collaborates with artists from other disciplines and is currently working on a series entitled "Music" along these lines, which is going forward from an experimental collaboration and presentation with electronic music and also the Polish opera singer Monica Kopec in Krakow, in November 2004. In early 2006, she participated in an exhibition titled "Electric Paint: The Computer as 21st Century Canvas", which toured the U.S. after opening at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin and for CeC & CaC 2006 (New Delhi, India), she contributed a small selection of recent images for screening as an Unaccompanied Presentation.