Lounging in the big city: A hybrid experiment—my painting fused with a found vintage sci-fi image, reimagined through Midjourney.
#FineArt #SciFiArt #Midjourney #DigitalHybrid #ArtExperiment

Today I'll write this quickly between the words of Mary Wallstonecraft Shelley. A very subdued work, a study in texture, both real & digital. The surround is a photo of a very old & weathered concrete slab, once part of a sidewalk in Helper, Utah. It's an illustration made of five photos, including the slab. The image is very muted colors resembling a daguerreotype, with a hint of gold. The rocks & structure are comprised of two different landscapes in the Arizona high deserts. "Aurora's Sentinel aka de Chelly," a Digital Hybrid I've been working on since the mid-nineties through a Canon 35mm SLR to a tiny Canon A5 point & shoot. Intermediaries like a Nikon 35mm film & slide scanner, a very large Epson scanner that has figured prominently in my years, a small flat bed Canon office scanner I use for grunged-up captures. Then, lots of sand, gravel, weeds, grasses, seeds & such. This work has been drafted, drawn & quartered in my head now for 39 years. I've finally finished the first full hybridization of the two photographs I've had circling inside my head like two 18th century cast iron ponies on a rumbling carousel. Or like two sequential dreams entwined by circumstances from the Way Back Machine. Events made it necessary to finish it this weekend. Something here now brought to Life again from alien constituent parts by me, much like Shelly's Doctor Frankenstein. He was created in her mind on a cold, dark, humid, and frigid night in Cologny, Switzerland, 1816. The year Tambora erupted and layered the Earth in a winter which lasted until the next winter. Mary Shelley had lost a parent, and a child by that year. This image, an homage to Aaron Siskind. I'll post the original image I made that wintry day in Helper, Utah, after staring at that section of concrete yanked from its bed of decades & left akilter against an old building in far worse shape. I almost missed it. It's to be my 1st substack post tomorrow, with far more words.

Aurora's Sentinel aka de Chelly #DigitalCollage
#TomOgburn #DigitalHybrid #Illustration
#Stundayc#EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Photoshop

“Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose” ≈ Mary Shelley

🧵⬇️4ALT

"Pan's brief eternity" emerged from another work I was making in 2011. It’s a lighter work as tones usually go in my digital images. The colors are largely a duotone composition of a slightly reddish sepia & cream color. To finish off the piece with a little more edge to it, a deep golden ocher is introduced as a large translucent pane over the model’s shoulder & a small rectangle, a reflection from underneath her chin. Pan is very pale & ghostlike & stares at you intently from their only visible eye, the other deep within shadows. Their pupil is heavily dilated, as Pan was known for excess, as well as killing many human trespassers who entered his realm. You’re under the gaze of the trickster god of old, one who existed in almost every mythic pantheon of the gods around the world. They are not amused by your presence but highly intrigued. You’re likely to never see home again, to be lured by this feral creature of mists into an eternity all to brief for the gods but very long and drawn out for humans. By 2023 I’d published more words on this work, which were largely about the method, mode & manner of the art I do inside Photoshop to create my digital composite images. Here’s a few, for there’s a story inside the story of Pan, for all riddlers are such folk. Since 1996, when I started building my first digital collages inside Photoshop by using the more painterly methods of additive/reductive, I started referring to the final images as digital composite builds. I'm also using older photographic methods & techniques. Like Ansel Adams employed long ago. After two decades he’d forgotten his method’s complexities & thanks to not keeping recipes (or losing those he did record) coupled with the advent of chemical changes in modern photography, Ansel never could return to those former methods he’d hoped to recover. The photos he made & developed were (after that time) less dense in tonalities, the blacks less rich & velvety. This made me realize recipes are good.

1️⃣“One day Alice came to a fork in the road & saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.” ≈ Lewis Carroll

"Pan's brief spell of Eternity" #DigitalHybrid work🧵⬇️

You are viewing a surreal, dreamlike image, a woman is contemplating, deep in thought. She's surrounded in a miasma of undulating patterns, weavings of the mind, as a shaman's visions may appear. The skull of a raven features prominently on the right side of the image, but is not situated so as to reveal its place in reference to the woman. "The ghosts of ravens' memories promenade in our dreams," from the Digital Hybrids works. Original model photo made in my Charleston Beaufain Street studio in 2003. Digital composite image 2021/2022, Copyright 2025 Tom Ogburn. In the lowcountry of South Carolina, Nature has produced another finely distributed bane, largely born on the wind as well, but not as noticeable as the visible fine dust driven by the Western winds, like small singularities of dust storms arising in strong gusts. It's called black mold. It seems to be carried by the softer prevailing salt marsh currents which are slower, but just as effective in spreading the airborne contaminants over Time. Again, Time, and Entropy. Two constants, second only to Change. "We press on, no matter the weight." ≈ TR Ritchie a digital hybrid series

"The ghosts of ravens' memories promenade in our dreams” #TomOgburn #Art #Stunday 🦋 #EastCoastKin #EtherealArt
#DigitalHybrid #Mindscape #Surrealism #Photography #DigitalArt #BlueskyArt #DigitalSurrealism #Postmodern #DigitalCompositeImage #Skyart #BlueskyPhotography

This is a digital abstraction, a diptych if you will. I decided to do this work after pondering it's source photo quite a lot one day. While it looks to be a simple mirroring (it's not, many variables are thrown into the cauldron on this one) it was actually a pretty time and mind consuming work. What will you see? Well, as in any art, the viewer will absorb what they sense a work is, but almost always that will be the case with abstracted artworks. I wanted a fantastical, dark and eerie female torso to be more clearly seen—let's say, it is being made manifest amid all the oscillation and vibrant though decaying plant matter. I have rarely built an image from a more dense experiential field of view, as much of that scene is still clearly accessible in my mind's eye to this day. Hint: I have never seen an area more laden with insects. The ground was alive with all different species of them. Very odd, as if all were called into swarm mode in unison. Over the years I've considered this; I wondered if seismic activity was occurring. Birds were flying erratically and hopping all over the place as well, so, hmm... [It is indeed presented as a spirit rising from the fall grasses about a quarter mile south of Mary Colter's Desertview Watchtower, located at the edge of Desert View Point]

“Cedar Spirit," a #DigitalHybrid from the #HybridWorks
#DigitalCompositeImage #DigitalAbstract
#TomOgburn #MultimediaArtist #America:Lost&Found #DigitalArt #Photography #Collage #GrandCanyonAZ
#EastCoastKin🦋#Scape #BlueskyArt #Skyart #BlueskyPhotography #DigitalCollage #Doppelganger