HYBRIDIZED WORLDS
Digital Collages
Artist Statement
by Wendy Seller
My practice explores the fusion of traditional painting techniques and digital image-building. My embrace of these polar-opposite artmaking approaches enables me to create intangible hybridized worlds that integrate past and present, populated by magical figures and surreal landscapes.
I developed this technique with Photoshop when an inherited “essential hand tremor” made it extremely difficult for me to write or paint any longer. My digital collages evolve from a myriad of sources, including my own photography, Renaissance paintings, and current-day catalogues or magazines. A single pictorial fragment or contemporary concept can serve as a seed that explodes in multiple directions, and begins an unpredictable journey into the deepest crevices in my brain. As I am developing a work, I often print out sections of it, paint on them, scan them back into my computer, then manipulate and integrate the painted elements into my collage using Photoshop. This is a back-and-forth and back-and-forth process.
Beginning with the collected imagery and throughout my iterative process, I create metaphorical women who emit internal power, fortitude, assertive-ness and wit. I see my collages as decisively positive as I observe changes within society concerning women’s lives.