Ted and d'Art
Welcome to Trubright d’Art, which is the made-up contraction for Ted Rubright Digital Art. I call the images “techno-spiritual constructs” because they seem to evoke a deeper meaning or connection then one would expect from computer generated or fractal designs. The images that I create have to evoke something in the viewer. Like David Letterman, I constantly ask the question, “Is it anything?” Most often it isn’t and even if it is, I’m not sure exactly what it is. Happily, that doesn’t matter because the brain of the viewer will fill in the gaps. That’s the beauty of the d’Art: it is similar to the phenomenon of people seeing faces in clouds or potatoes or the Virgin Mary in a piece of tree bark. We want to see something in these mathematical and algorithmic constructs. And we do.
How it’s Made
People often ask me about the process I use to create digital prints. My images are generated using software that does for graphics what a keyboard synthesizer does for sound. It’s called ArtMatic Pro by U&I Software. Coming up with a picture in the graphics synth is almost identical to programming a musical synth. I start off with a promising idea and then tweak it until something good happens. Occasionally I hit a random image button and stumble on something beautiful but that’s rare. Often I come up empty-handed, like a lion that just misses the gazelle on a nature program. It’s very easy to be close to a good image only to have the whole thing collapse into a garbled mess!
About Ted
As for my bio, I am a classical percussionist with a day job in academic technology. Here’s a link to my musical “picture bio.” I started drawing as a small child and kept it up until high school when I spent more and more time studying music. For years I thought that I would get back to visual art but I didn’t know which direction to go in. One night my wife and a friend rented a movie about Picasso which I’m pretty sure was this one. Seeing his process was a revelation to me; I would have to be fearless before the blank paper. I decided that every attempt was just that, an attempt. There was nothing that couldn’t be thrown out or started over. This freed me up to experiment.
The first thing I did then was go back to the ink and watercolor drawings that I had done as a kid. I started with a pencil sketch and went over it with india ink. After cleaning up the drawing, I washed it with watercolor. They were semi-abstract but with hard edges and defined colors – somewhat cartoony. I did a lot of them in all sizes. Eventually I started painting parts of them with acrylic paint so they became “mixed media” on paper. Finally I jumed entirely to paint and started experimenting with abstraction.
The digital art happened concurrently with the analog art. I found some software that was essentially an image synthesizer. For a long time the results I was getting were pretty dismal. If anything good happened it was dumb luck and I couldn’t repeat the process. After years of on and off experimentation I got better and better at it, though there is still a lot of trial and error. Happy accidents are what it’s all about and also knowing when to stop.
I have done several shows of my ink and watercolor drawings, and am starting to show more of the d’Art.
