Week One Assignment Reagan Franzoni

The artist I chose for week 1 from the Museum of Computer Art is Joan Myerson Shrager. She is an American digital artist. She has been an artist for over 30 years and originally studied painting, sculpture, and ceramics at Moore College of Art and Design and Tyler School of Art. She uses photoshop and illustrator to create some of her designs. More recently, she has started using a new software called Procreate used on an iPad. A lot of her art features photographs of some of her hand-made sculptures covered with designs digitally made in illustrator or Procreate. These sculptures and photographs are usually the basis of her digital paintings.

Some of her recent work follows the tragic stories behind some of the Russian attacks on Ukraine. Other digital paintings reveal the emotions behind wars from the past. A lot of her work reflects experiences and deep thoughts about life and consciousness. She uses bright bold colors to layer on her digital paintings to bring out and distinguish the details made between technology and real art. She usually likes to tell a story through her art and the computer allows her to shape her ideas in ways that physical art materials usually can’t do. The image I chose to attach from her portfolio is one from the art of war pieces. It illustrates a ghost and possibly a family portrait from a long time ago from a previous war and the ghost in this image is probably a soldier fighting in Ukraine. She includes sunflowers in a lot of these pieces, my guess is to bring a more enlightened mood to such a tragic situation or to bring peace to the ghosts in the images. It looks like she may have used illustrator to create more of an original piece with what look to be older photographs dissolved into the image. 

Link to Joan Myerson Shrager Website-

http://joan-myersonshrager.com/