Jo Gedrych
What is there to say that's at all interesting to anyone other than me? I’m a CGI artist – ie someone who creates images using advanced computer technology. It occupies uncomfortable ground between painting and photography while being neither and both.
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I trained at Brighton College of art in the early 1960s mostly in how to party, but ostensibly in graphic design and photography. I’ve been round the block a few times. Done this and that and now spend a lot of time doing this I returned to illustration some four years ago as a way of stopping my brain from turning into the cabbage its shape implies. In my early years, around age nine, I started collecting textures and pasting them into collages, I did model making, played with construction sets, model aircraft and boats, went on into set and costume design then photography and graphic design, finally into direction and writing which consumed the next thirty plus years.
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Oddly enough CGI combines all of those interests and adds a few more. You start by making a model, clothe and paint it, then put it into a setting, pose it, arrange the lights, finally you set up the cameras and picture it. The final stages are more like print making with concerns about image resolution, run of print and image size. Some images resolutely remain as screen images, others get printed. The range of subjects covers everything from single model virtual photoshoots to complex fantasy landscapes.
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I'm intrigued by the relationships between viewer and viewed, between the challenges of virtual reality and what we consider real. And how we relate to screen based images, moving pictures and flat art. There are deliberate echoes of the past in what I do, harking back to the realist painters of traditional art. Very specifically the Pre-Raphelites, such as Millaise and Holman Hunt. Much of this work was highly charged with religious, classical and mythological references designed to hide the erotic nature of much of the work.
For me, all art has an erotic nature. It is designed to appeal directly to the senses in a very sensual and non-intellectual way. Without that dynamism it wouldn't be art. I'm not claiming to be anywhere near as good as many of those artists but I do consider myself to be in the same tradition.
All my work is for sale and, although I usually please myself, I also undertake commissions.
Copyright Jo Gedrych© 2010