Always Leafing Never Staying

Always Leafing Never Staying, 2006

Continuing the series of digital artworks created while I was living in rural Malaysia.

I had started using digital layering in Photoshop back in England, some decade and a half ago. By the time I have left England for Malaysia I had given up physical painting altogether. I just was not practical to carry bags of gouache colours and paintbrushes around with me.

Digital layering relies on me taking many digital photographic images of the countryside around me, often cutting out the main image, by hand, then adding different photographs, in layers and manipulating their density, colour, sometimes erasing parts of the photographs to let other layers show through.

The final image is arrived at in a process similar to abstract painting, in so much as you know, roughly, where you want to end up but anything can, and does, happen along the way. I stress that ALL the images I use are taken by me, not rummaged from the internet. It is important that I am the whole originator of these images, that I have selected the images all the way through the process trying to ascertain the 'essence' of Malaysian rural life, at any one moment in time.