miguel

Profile

Name: miguel
Age: 58
City: Eureka Springs
Country: United States

Joined: Oct 2007

I know this sounds like a blues song, but I was born in the farming area of Mississippi and the first part of my childhood was spent partially on my Grandparents farm. My grandmother was a great truck patch tender and grew flowers all over the property. In my thirties I took up a love for organic agriculture and began to grow baby lettuces, edible flowers and culinary herbs. Before the farm phase of my life I was an Executive Chef in California and traveled in between projects. I lived in Mexico and Central America and visited Hawaii and other botanical wondrous areas where my eye for natural art was honed. As a younger man I took photographs and since I began to use Digital photography I have been slightly obsessed.

The orchids came into play as something I grew on the farm and I began to photograph them as my main subject a few years ago. My main career up until a few years ago was as a Cross-Cultural Chef, food stylist and sometimes owner manager of restaurants.

The type of work I do now is a style I invented using high megapixel cameras, Photoshop CS 2 (photographic software along with 5 or 6 other brands of software for photography), and a Wacom Tablet, which allows me to use a plenum as a brush, pen or pencil. This tablet has gigs of memory allocated to it which allows me to use close to 1000 brush combinations, all the colors available, (1000’s,) and an unbelievable amount of filters. The multitudes of possible avenues are endless. This freedom as an artist is only measured by my imagination. I am also writing a teaching program as a tutorial using these combinations along with the Museum quality printing that I do in my studio. At some point I am interested in publishing the work as a guide to other interested photographers and artists.

I still have a bag of digital tricks and software I am just beginning to use that will take Paintography up to another plane. The next phase of my work will have me using some celestial manipulation to make the orchids heavenly in nature.

It took some time for me to conceptualize the method I use and even longer to explain to people what it is I do, and it was quite difficult for me to sum it up quickly without pontificating, so I came up with the name Paintography and that sums it up in a word. Photographs taken to a painterly level. The adventure of using so much variety in one print has captured me and I am anxious to see where this learning curve will take me, but the fun is limitless, as are the possibilities.

Miguel Forbus

EMAIL MILAGROREY@AOL.COM