Fred Herscovitch: Writings - Photoshopping Cross-Canada
Photoshopping Cross-Canada is a series of paintings I created in collaboration with Kenneth Hemmerick. Kenneth and I met in Montreal in 1974. Eventually, he moved to North Vancouver, and my wife Mara and I followed a few years later, ending up in the same apartment complex. Some time later, Ken moved back to Montreal.
Notwithstanding all this hopping around, our joint venture actually began in Vancouver in 1985 when I created a design called "The Illuminated Star of David." Mara and I moved to Toronto two years later; however, it wasn't until 1998 that I decided to base an acrylic painting on this design. I worked on a bevelled circular canvas, changed the colour scheme, and named the painting after the original design.
On a visit to Montreal around 2002, Kenneth and I spent a rewarding afternoon together during which he scanned a photograph of my painting, and then he used Photoshop to create several astonishingly beautiful transformations of "The Illuminated Star of David." The following chart shows three versions he created that afternoon. The thumbnails are named "Plastic Wrap," "Lit Baseball," and "Mosaic Effect." The recursive transformations resumed in 2006 back in Toronto where I based the painting "Mosaica" on Kenneth's "Mosaic Effect."
Photoshopping Cross-Canada
(Click on images to see larger versions.)
April 30, 2009
Fred Herscovitch