Week 4 Research Assignment - Reagan Franzoni

The artist I chose for week 4 from the Museum of Computer Art is Wil Dawson. He is a digital artist who specializes in vector graphics. Dawson studied art as a minor in college and learned to paint a little in the past,  but his skills were self taught over the years. He lived in Spain for many years, and a lot of his ideas for inspiration came from the subject matters and visuals of Spain. Dawson likes to focus on the composition of his graphics rather than the subject matter. Wil Dawson creates his designs using a vector-drawing program called Corel Draw on the PC. These designs are created from a combination of geometric shapes and lines that have more of a painted texture and style in their form and colors rather than a digital graphic with a pixelated texture.

The image I chose from Dawson’s collection of vector graphics is called “Cane, Chain, and Stone” and is an image of some sort of chain, which looks to be a necklace or jewelry chain, a diamond, and a cane. This image looks as if it could be describing old wealth that has become broken because the picture shows a broken chain wrapped around the cane with pieces of diamonds shattered. This could be a symbol that someone may have left behind a piece of expensive jewelry and it has become eroded over time. The cane also looks to be wrapped in flowers and the way the flowers hang off of the cane it forms the shape of a cross. This could be a symbol of someone who has passed away and that is their jewelry that is breaking down after they have passed. This piece looks as if it could have been an AI generation of a vector-drawn graphic used on Corel Draw on the computer. I like this composition of the image because it provides a reflection of color through the diamond which brings out the details in the cane and the chain and allows us to see the smaller details of the image such as the flowers and the broken diamond pieces. 

There is no actual link to his website, but this is the MOCA link:

https://moca.virtual.museum/dawson/dawson01.htm

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