The Weekender
Johannesburg, South Africa
October, 2006

Invented Travelogues, Landscapes for Imagining
by Michael Coulson

Claire Wolf Krantz may use a computer to make her art, but her approach remains that of a painter
Michael Coulson

If you think that computer-generated art is easy and that all you have to do is play around on Photoshop then you’re way behind the times. You need to look at US artist  Claire Wolf Krantz’s “Invented Travelogues”: digital works that, with time off for eating, writing, and relating to her husband David, have occupied her fully for the past two years - since the couple last visited South Africa, when David was a visiting professor at the University of Cape Town.

Krantz had always wanted to be an artist, but her parents wanted her to become a doctor. So she became an occupational therapist - they make use of art and crafts in treatments, she says. While she was successful in her career, she was unhappy, she says, and eventually studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Advancing from drawing and painting, she took a course called Generative Systems. This embraced not only experimentation with computers, but other machines as well. She arranged objects on the windows of copying machines, a modern equivalent of the rayographs Man Ray made in the 1930s by placing objects directly on photographic plates.

Then she started using collage and photographs, and has explored other kinds of input for her prints. Internationally, though, she remains better known as a painter than a digital artist, although she has also  worked in other media, including monoprints. To her, a computer is just a tool. Before creating an artwork, she’ll play around with the composition on a computer. Conversely, she approaches digital prints like a painter, in terms of both composition and execution. The basis may be manipulated photographic images, but there are also painted elements to smooth the transition from one photographic image to another.

The origin of the “Invented Travelogues” show is the print, “Passport to India”. Although relatively simple - only a couple of basic images are used - her art dealer liked it. In their discussions, the concept was developed from using real images of photographs taken during travel and manipulating them to create landscapes that look authentic, but are in fact imaginary. It’s easy to be deceived: there’s an image of a shack near Cape Town, for instance, that some claim to recognize, which does not exist. Yet each print is nevertheless derived from the place in its title, and captures its essence. The feeling that we’re sharing in her travels is reinforced by the maps, visas or passport stamps superimposed on many of the prints.

Some works, such as “Passport to Turkey: Cappadocia,” rely on a few photographic images, in this case a montage of hanging carpets and a street scene, though each image is itself manipulated. In the recent, more complex prints - both Photoshop and her skill with it have developed over the past decade - she uses details from up to 20 photographs. Each is cut up, enhanced or adapted and subtly transformed in many ways. The possibilities are infinite. Consider the three images from Nepal. From the primary “Passport to Nepal” she made minor changes to create a completely different picture in “Passport to Nepal: River,” and further modifications in “Passport to Nepal: Pokara, Trek”.

These are not like say, Andy Warhol’s digital images of Marilyn Monroe, where all that changes is the color. These are more like musical variations on a theme, each taking a leitmotif but developing it in a different way. Of course, what counts in visual art is not the sophistication of the technique but its effect on the viewer, and Krantz engages both the eye and the mind.

Many of the landscapes depict remote areas, teasing our imagination about the people who live there. And how, we wonder, did our traveler stray so far from civilization? Even when there is no such subtext, the observer is fascinated by how the artist created a particular effect. While some of the manipulation is apparent, each picture has a seamless unity.
  
However you approach it, this body of work takes digital art to a level never before seen in South Africa.

Krantz’s exhibition runs at gordart Gallery in Melville until October 28. She’s also an artist in residence at the Bag Factory in Fordsburg, where an exhibition of her work will be held in December.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.