— The featured artist of the 76th issue of Living the Photo Artistic Life magazine is New Jersey-based AWAKE artist Ron Pearl. It’s great to be able to interview Ron here on Quill and Camera . . .
Q: What got you started in Digital Photo Artistry?
Dorothy Parker, the writer and satirist said, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
As far back as I remember, I have always been creatively curious. As a kid, when I looked at my comic books I would ask myself, “Why can’t I do that?” So at the age of five I started copying my favorite comic book characters, taped the pictures together like a film, and using an open shoebox rigged with wire hangers as my movie theater delivered my “movies” in school during “show and tell.”
This creative curiosity has turned up again and again throughout my life. In the early 1960’s it was folk music, writing and performing topical songs. In the 1980’s with the advent of the new personal computers I taught myself BASIC and wrote an income tax program that was marketed by Synapse Software Co. At the turn of the century I started making slideshows on dvds and housed in a photo album for newly engaged couples. This is when I started using Photoshop, to edit my clients’ family photos.
In 2010 I got started in fine art photography. Over the next eight years I joined two local camera clubs, did quite well in club and gallery competitions, exhibited and sold some images, and was published in Photoshop User magazine.
Everything was fine . . . except I wasn’t really growing as an artist. Then I came across an ad online for Sebastian Michaels’s Photoshop Artistry course. I knew that this was for me and I signed up in the middle of 2018. I joined the AWAKE Group as soon as it opened up again in 2019. Now the magic is back and I am enjoying my artistic journey down this exciting path.
Q: What is it that inspires your work?
My inspiration comes from the things I like . . . the art I look at, the books I read, the movies I watch, the music I listen to. I am also influenced by the people in my life and the places where I live and visit.
(I just watched the new movie “In The Heights” and came up with two ideas for future images by focusing on the cinematography.)
As an artist I am a collector. I look at an art piece and decide if there is something I like and can use in my own art. If the answer is yes then I “steal” it. That’s right, I am a “creative kleptomaniac,” as defined by Austin Kleon in his excellent book “Steal Like An Artist.” As Picasso said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
I draw the resources I need for my creative ideas from my art folders and transform the material into my own piece of art — something I hope is better or at least different than what was inherent in the content before I took it up.
I’m convinced nothing is wholly original. Everything is a remix, a rehash or mash up of something that came before. Steve Jobs said it best: “It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and bringing those things into what you are doing.”
If you are an artist and you see anything in my art that would work for you, go ahead and steal it, take it to your desk, and use it in your art. See what new thing you can do with it. Then put your art out there so that we can steal it back from you.
Q: What does living a photo artistic life mean to you?
When it comes to “Living the Photo Artistic Life,” I honestly don’t really think about it. At this point it’s just a part of me. As an artist it’s what I do and who I am. My mind is on autopilot, always on the lookout for new creative ideas while observing the world around me. No matter whatever else I’m doing, I know that I will eventually return to my creative place, my comfort zone, so I can play within my own expanded imaginary reality where time seems to stand still and I am at peace.
Q: Going forward, where do you see your creative curiosity taking you?
This past year I started a series of images with a central theme. My ongoing “Prima Ballerina” series contains about 20 images that I can now use for an exhibit. Due to my curiosity I now watch and research ballet. Leah, my granddaughter and dancer, tells me the names of the ballet positions that I put into my art pieces. Mikail Baryshnikov has a quote that can pertain to creatives as well as to dancers: “Dancers [creatives] are made, not born.”
I remember as a little boy, being excited and full of wonder, when my father used to take me to the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn on the weekend. I’ve tried to mirror my childhood emotions in my surreal curious child and wildlife images, such as in one of my favorite art pieces “The Boy and the Lion.” And I plan on turning these art pieces into a new series as I move forward.
In 1965 I was a socially conscious broadside troubadour and today I am a socially conscious photo artist who has switched his platform from music to art. The most impactful image I created last year was “In the Mind of a Survivor.” In going through my resources I came across a picture of a woman on a train that screamed “Holocaust” to me. So with a heavy heart I created this “Never Again!” picture.
I have also completed seven art pieces about the covid pandemic. My favorite is called “Distorted Times” which is a play on Salvador Dali’s surrealist masterpiece “The Persistence of Memory” (with melting clocks). “Distorted Times” is a subtle pandemic piece about lack of normalcy in our disrupted lives. The image itself looks like a “Where’s Waldo” with Dali squeezed between wall to wall distorted timepieces. (Incidentally, Salvador Dali was once quoted as saying, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”)
Q: Any advice or tips for other aspiring digital artists?
Have fun! All you need is passion and determination to become a photo artist. How far you get depends on the effort that you put into it. You don’t have to master everything in Photoshop. Just learn the basics of what you will need to create images then add from there as needed.
Take Sebastian Michaels’s course on Photoshop Artistry. He will provide you with resources for your artistic endeavors, teach you the skills involved, and point you in the direction of living and thinking like an artist. Then practice, practice, practice!
Above all, open your mind to the world around you. Visit a place in your town that you never saw before and really look around. If you’re a reader, read a book in a new genre. Curiosity is the rocket fuel for creativity.
When you were a curious child you didn’t have any problem asking “Why?” So ask questions, not only of other artists about being successful in art, but of any successful person you know about how they became successful. And really listen to their answers. Become a good listener.
You are a unique individual with your own life experiences, things you like, things that motivate you. Make the most of it. As Oscar Wilde once said, “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”
So have fun being you. And enjoy the journey you are on.
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