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DigitalFOTO Magazine:
April 2001, p.54
Veteran composite artist and award-winning photographer Ron Brown (www.picfx.com) started his career 20 years ago in what he calls "the dark ages before Photoshop and Illustrator." Brown's conceptual work, which fuses photography and illustration, has glossed the covers and pages of Communication Arts, Guitar, Electronic Musician, P.E.I., PC Magazine, and Windows NT. He's also worked with ad agencies to create ads for notable clients including Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, Volkswagen, SAP Corporation, ReadRite Corporation, and Grammercy Pictures. Rather than attempt to distort an image to convey a message, Brown tries to find a relationship between unrelated thing. "My work might be a demonstration of deconstruction-taking traditional meanings of images and recycling them based on technological advances," he explains.
"The use of color, shape, value, texture, and variety are all in place but composed in a neo-surrealistic way." Think Salvador Dali meets Bill Gates.
Armed with a Nikon D2x, and a Sinar 4x5, Brown uses hi res files. He then creates his art using a slew of products including Photoshop, Illustrator, Morph, and Dimensions to get the desired effect. "I've had gallery owners tell me my work was too commercial and art directors tell me my work was fine art," he recollects. "Obviously, good work can show up in either place. Today, my images still cross over."
PHOTO Electronic Imaging:
The Concept Man - Photographer and Digital Artist Ron Brown Solves Visual Problems
Coming upon an unusual object, most people will exclaim, "What is that?" But not a visual artist like Ron Brown, of Salt Lake City. More likely, the creator of this months cover image, "Exploding Guitar," would regard the object in silence for a while, envisioning all of the things it might be.
Brown is a seasoned professional photographer and a sought-after digital illustrator. Clients like Sun Microsystems and advertising agency Battenberg, Fill Hardt, and Wright count on Ron Brown Photographics to do more than deliver what they ask for; they count on him to solve visual problems. How, for example, do you visually express the synthesis of cable television, Internet access, and long distance telephone service in one image? The image on page 13 was the solution Brown presented to Media One, a television cable company headquartered in Colorado. As in virtually all of Brown's illustrations, the photographic elements were drawn from his own bank of digitized stock images.
Steve Adams, creative director of Windows NT magazine, has been working with Brown for years. "Stylistically," he told PEI, "Ron has a great eye for composition. After a brief chat about the actual tack of the layout and illustration, Ron's on his way to creating a rich, colorful interpretation that I can always count on to be technically accurate."
It takes even more than technical expertise to satisfy discriminating art directors. When there is a complex story to illustrate, PC Magazine Assistant Art Director Lora Morgenstern says she relies on Brown "to create innovative, eye-catching illustrations." His flexible nature, she said, allows him to "combine and play with concepts so he can work on difficult stories that at first seem impossible to illustrate." (Brown discusses one such project in the tutorial beginning on page 14.) Morgenstern knows the photographer has a library of images at hand, and that he's equipped to photograph new elements on location or in the studio. Landscapes, people, product shots-he's done them all, and he refuses to be pigeonholed into a particular genre of photography.
Because he usually controls every element of the design project from the start, Brown can build in such layout and design considerations as the placement of the copy and the size and shape of the finished product. In a career of close to 20 years, Brown now enjoys a free hand with most assignments, and he's never blown a deadline.
In the Utah desert near Brown's Salt Lake City home lies a barren stretch of desert so alkaline that no wildlife inhabits it. This wasteland, all that's left of the vast, prehistoric Lake Bonneville, will support only scant shrub grass. Brown and his family call the area "The Nothing." But even in Nothing the artist finds inspiration.
Brown was thoroughly versed in traditional darkroom technology before computer imaging came along. At Utah State University, he had fallen under the spell of the Ansel Adams photographic tradition, learning to use the Zone System of previsualization, and hand developing museum-quality prints from 8x10 inch negatives.
Though his style is distinctly his own, Brown has been influenced by Jerry Uelsmann, Edvard Munch, Salvador Dali, and perhaps most evidently, by Marcel Duchamp, with his Dadaist technique of painting the subject from many perspectives at once (notably, "Nude Descending a Staircase." 1912). Like Duchamp, Brown brings extra dimensionality to his images, without using 3-D rendering software. Instead, the artist works mostly in Adobe Photoshop, where he directs light, shadow, and perspective to lend the illusion of depth.
"I remember thinking in college," said Brown, "that there had to be something to bridge the gap between illustration and photography." That something, of course, would be Photoshop, which Brown runs on a dual processor Macintosh G4 with a gig and a half of RAM.
Out here, water is literally a life force; like inspiration, it is scarce, vital, and coveted. A single drop is precious.
Found objects often make their way into Brown's stock repertoire and subsequently, like the
brass faucet in "Water Drop," into photo compositions. Struck by its "beauty" in a hardware store, But this is a man who sees intricate beauty in the natural process of organic decomposition, or the delicate filaments of lichen on granite. The image has been internationally distributed through a stock agency.
Ron Brown Photographics hopped on the Web early on. For the first few years, the photographer pursued his career in Boston and New York, but when he realized he could serve national clients from any location, he moved his family west, finally settling in Salt Lake City.
The artist has won international accolades for both photography and digital imaging-it's a long list. Now the curators of exhibitions and juried competitions in such art capitals as London, New York, and Boston, invite him to participate in shows. Recently, he was asked to participate in the prestigious Agart World Print Festival in Ljubjana, Slovenia. "Enter" (above) was one of the images on display there.
"I think photography is the perfect marriage of art and science," said Brown. "You have to control the medium to express your vision.
Electronic Imaging UK:
Oh, the challenges in commercial imaging these days. Just ask Utah artist Ron Brown. It's not so much the concepts that stump art directors, it's finding a common ground in technology. A sampling of stories from the frontline: There was the time an art director called technical support to ask how to get a picture into his computer. He had folded the photograph Brown sent him and was literally trying to stuff the image into the floppy disk drive. Then there was the time the art director asked Brown for an assignment in 35 "M-M," not knowing what 35mm means.
But in the big picture, commercial imaging is, if not abundant, out there, and Brown is working steadily for clients all over the country from his Salt lake city-based studio, Photo-Graphics. His images bridge the gap between photography and illustration, providing a photorealistic view of unreal objects. With his unique style, Brown creates a surrealistic world that is all his own.
"I was trained in the Ansel Adams tradition of fine art photography," said Brown. "I use the Zone System." But he kept his interest in illustration and took classes from famous illustrators who visited the university. He was the only photographer to study under these illustrators.
At the beginning of his career, Brown used traditional photography and manipulated images by hand in the darkroom. "I tried to figure out a way to add painterly qualities to my work, so I used to do color stripping onto 8x10-inch Ektachrome." In those days, he would spend several days on an image, making as many as 70 exposures from a single piece of Ektachrome dupe film.
His images have won him awards and critical acclaim, and his work is often shown in galleries in London, New York, Toronto, and other cities. But Brown works for the love of imaging, not for the awards and glory. "The awards are just kind of a vehicle to get people to see the kind of work you do. A lot of awards are won for low-budget jobs in which the artist had a lot of creative freedom." Brown simply loves doing the work he does. In fact, he has been known to take low-budget jobs just because he was given complete creative freedom.
"I get a lot of medical and hightech work that's not only challenging to shoot, but challenging conceptually," Brown noted. He believes that his strongest selling point is his ability to come up with a visual concept of whatever a contractor is trying to project. "I did some images for BYTE magazine," he recalled. "They faxed me some stuff on computer viruses, which no one had even heard of at the time. It was well before that became known to the general public. I had to come up with a concept for that. A lot of people say there's a real sense of 3-D quality to my work. If it's a more surrealistic image, like 'Mr. Potatohead' and looks three-dimensional," said Brown, then viewers know it's Brown's work. Usually, his images have a photorealistic quality, even when they are obviously unreal.
In addition to his artistic work, Brown enjoys landscape photography. He likes to photograph Native American petroglyphs (stone carvings) and pictographs (stone paintings). "That's one of the reasons I live in Utah, He enjoys the freedom of interacting with the landscape his father taught him to appreciate and enjoy.
Brown still does imaging just for his own enjoyment, aside from his commercial work. "Every assignment I do, I try to make a portfolio piece, whether it's a $500 job or a $20,000 job," he said. "My favorite image is the last one I made."
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Article: IDAA Art Awards