I am a third generation painter. But unlike my Viennese father and grandmother, I’m the first to dip into a digital tool box, and the first to do art for your sake, and not my own.

Originally, I opened Art For Your Sake in 2004 as a mecca for digital camera owners seeking that One Perfect Photo. Today, I create meaningful, personalized digital photomontages for celebration - but also for healing and (for example, as memorials, or as "peace pipes" to open dialogue and find closure).

Influences?

The MAGNUM photographers of the 30s, the photo-collages of Jacques Prevert, Polish poster art, and the great photo-retouchers of the Stalinist period. In my previous life I was in advertising, and in some sense, I’m still in advertising, suspending disbelief and turning things on their head. Only this time, I'm doing it in the service of comfort and joy.

Why do I call my work "dreamscapes"?

Seamless and with real shadow play, my digital photomontages are moments frozen in time that lavish attention on memory. Populated with people, possessions and landscapes from my clients’ archival photos, memorabilia or even personal artwork, these "dreamscapes" also include unique objects and backgrounds from my own photography. Often, they are infused with humor and witty effects that become liberating inside jokes for the client.

After playing with the hierarchies of scale and lighting, I re-integrate the images into a new reality which brings positive memories to the front while safely removing more negative or painful associations conjured up by the original photographs. This re-imagined past becomes their wishful reality.

Setting up their dreamscapes like miniature shrines, clients seem to continually draw new information from their dreamscapes every day, depending on their mood or circumstances. How exactly does this work? Does digital photomontage allow us to view emotionally wrought photos from a different cognitive place, as symbols, metaphors and patterns? Does it help us to see our life on a purely artistic plane, as players, props and plots?

Or does it simply allow us to give the past many alternate endings, just like the future? The evidence – that is, what the clients write about their pieces - shows that it may be healthier to try a different ending once a day.

Artist Highlights

• ArtWanted.com Gallery:    Digital Painting
• Proficient Software:   Photoshop CS2
• Past Clients:    National Hospice Foundation