Catalogue Essay
July, 2002
Flatfile Gallery

Barbara Crane and John Miller
by Claire Wolf Krantz

Barbara Crane and John Miller are long established artists in their fields who have recently delved into digital technology as a means for broadening their respective photographs and paintings. By investigating the potentialities in the digital camera and computer, they are discovering new ways of creating and presenting their pictures while retaining their singular points of view.

Neither artist is concerned with depicting literal reality as subject matter. Fundamentally committed to abstraction, their goals and outcomes vary widely: While Crane’s abstract vision is a controlled one, reducing her photographic information to the bare essentials, Miller’s abstraction is additive, with the juxtaposition of different elements of paint or collage. Miller’s ensemble is colorful and discordant in contrast to Crane’s subdued color and harmonic sensibility.

These differences in approach affect Crane’s and Miller’s relationship to digital processes as well. Miller’s previous delight in juxtaposing areas of differently painted shapes, textures, colors and collage to the canvas has carried over into his computer pieces to facilitate an expanded horizon for formal experimentation and for his new output as inkjet prints. He revels in the interactive qualities of the computer - of enabling a new kind of process of discovery and of searching for unexpected outcomes and pursuing them. Although he has always taken pictures and included collage elements in his paintings, he now uses a digital camera to record objects in the world that often contain interesting colors, masses and textures of paint. Sometimes he makes prints from collages that he layers directly on his scanner; at other times, he draws colored lines and shapes with computer tools and uses various filters to compose entirely new pictures. In one of my favorites, Miller distorts horizontal lines into tiny squiggles, composing what looks like a manuscript page of undecipherable calligraphy. While a few new works have political agendas, such as feminist-oriented prints composed from photos he took in India, most of Miller's work remains essentially abstract in nature, concentrating on visual excitement and pleasure.

In contrast, Crane’s interest in digital processes is an extension of her lifelong interest in exploiting camera technology for a given set of goals, typically pushing the camera’s capabilities to its utmost to elicit the abstract essence of a given situation. This abstract sensibility reveals Crane’s heritage in the Bauhaus aesthetic prominent at Chicago’s Institute of Design, where she received her MS degree in photography. The majority of her pictures are created with the camera - in the framing, focusing and attention to the quality of light on her subject rather than in the darkroom. As she points the camera, she eliminates all inessential elements to arrive at her desired compositions and tonal relationships. Massing areas of light and dark, sharpness and blur, line and contour, she directs the viewers’ eyes in moving around the picture. Later, darkroom or computer work enhances her initial decisions, the computer now replacing the darkroom in facilitating adjustments to the original image.

Furthermore, her interest in collage is rekindled by the ease and immediacy of assembling diverse images on a flatbed scanner. It is interesting to note that Crane’s handling of collage differs from Miller’s in that Crane uses disparate photographic elements to arrive at new harmonies instead of the disjunctions found in Miller’s prints. Moreover, digital technologies allow her the freedom to be more playful and open to unexpected results obtained in her inkjet prints.

In the hands of these experienced artists, using the computer is not an end in itself: It is a tool to enhance an already established aesthetic sensibility. Crane and Miller continue to evoke emotional and tactile responses to their sensual treatment of images and surfaces, and to explore further existing ideas and points of view. In their hands, digital processes are the means by which John Miller and Barbara Crane are “pushing the envelope” of their art.

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.