#DigitalCollage #DigitalArt #DigitalAbstracts #Hybrids #sensoryart #artbrut #smArtist #Occlusions
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On the Occlusions: A series begun in 2012 using Photoshop anomalies as a painter would ground & glaze a painting. They sprang into being, announcing themselves as mistakes.🧵⬇️

The Occlusion series of works by Tom Ogburn are digitally originated in Photoshop by a painter who's created abstract expressionist paintings most of his career. Occlusion, as a word, came into my mind one day due to members in my family who had evolving vision impairments as they aged. While not really the proper term to use for vision blockage such as cataracts or glaucoma, I decided to hijack the term as I kept pulling back from occluded, especially after finding one of the rare uses of occlusion was as the halting of the breath when in the flow of speaking consonants. I remember one of my grandmother's eye doctors using the term occlusion to describe her failing vision. That was also where vision loss became a term that was becoming applicable to my family, for many of the Adams in late life dealt with cataracts, glaucoma & macular degeneration. As I edged into my forties & finally decided to migrate from illustration into fine art full time, these emergences of vision loss affected me all the more, both in terms of those I loved & had known all my life becoming increasingly unable to see well enough to perform many actions that we take for granted when we have good vision. Early on, as my grandmother would try to explain verbally what she was seeing which blocked her vision & how it was changing over time, all the more I began to fear the idea that I too could begin to experience vision loss. To me, for all the years I've relied on excellent vision & color perception. It was one of the worst things I could imagine; even to the point of pulling ahead of Death itself. Nowadays, while it certainly would be a staggering loss, but I have come to love painting with words. Even in total blindness, with the advent of modern digital voice recognition, I can always paint with words. Technology does have a celebrated upside when used for the common good & it also can dispel fear wrought for decades within the mind’s sense of memory & the fears stored within it.

Occlusion: Clocktower #TomOgburn #Stunday #ArtYear
#HybridDigitals #Occlusions #DigitalAbstracts #DigitalArt
#BlueskyArt #Postmodern #DigitalGrunge #DigitalCollage
#EastCoastKin 🦋 #artbrut #Skyart

Occlusions: A series begun in 2012 using #Photoshop anomalies as a painter would ground & glaze ⬇️4alt

"This time, a monumental feature on the landscape, occluded. I think this series just got it's name, as they are all occlusions by the time I'm done with them." In my family, visual occlusion has been a fairly common thing for many of us to contend with, sooner or later. I was recording my grandmother one year, asking her about family history. She mentioned her eyesight. We entered a conversation in which I asked her to describe what she saw, colors & all. I found a short transcription in a file folder one day years later & made some notes, also using some pastels to try to render it. In time I began experimenting on Photoshop with the layers tool, which eventually led me into a realm of creating from images overlap upon others, textures and planes of colors. The scene was an overlook where some fairly tall grass had turned a deep golden tan, which seemed odd enough. But the great gray-black vertical cloud formation was heightening all the colors. In the original photo the sky is a pale washed-out blue, then the strong grays, the odd ochre grass cover blowing in the wind, with the faded asphalt king rather ungainly in the foreground. "Darkstorm Overlook," from mid-September, 2019 on the upper part of the Blue Ridge Parkway. A huge vertical wall of a dark cloud formation had loomed above a great granite cliff wall underneath it. It didn't turn out well as a standalone photograph so it was shelved until I saw it in a file folder a few months back. I was looking for images suitable for "occlusion-training," something I’ve really become taken by lately. It’s becoming kind of a multi-color field minimalist technique for me. Being a painter, I keep applying painterly processes within this mode of digital art-making, primarily additive/reductive, along with emulating traditional underpainting, glazing & scumbling methodologies. Really—it’s intriguing.

"This time, a monumental feature on the landscape, occluded. I think this series just got it's name, as they're all #occlusions." From 2019 on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

"Darkstorm Overlook" from the edge of post-minimalism
#TomOgburn #Stunday #EastCoastKin #DigitalCompositeImage #DigitalMinimalism