This month's featured artist:

CATHERINE MCINTYRE

Catherine McIntyre is an embodiment of that genre of artist so distinctly post-modern: the Computer Graphic Artist. I was lucky enough to stumble across her personal web page (see link below) one night as I was surfing for new and unusual art, and I knew instantly that her creations belonged in the Shadowland Art Gallery. Her work has appeared in various publications including The British Journal of Photography, Computerfoto (In Germany), and Black & White (In Australia). Catherine's illustrations have graced books and magazines (the latter including PRIDE magazine's June 1999 issue). She has also designed album covers for recording artists like Alphaville, Six Cents, and Evensong. Her works, created using the Adobe Photoshop graphics package, combine images of nudes with natural (and sometimes very unnatural) elements to create wonderful collages which both complement and contradict, fusing human forms with unexpected environments that often suggest an emotion rather than defining a moment. There is a fluidity, a sense of motion in many of her images, and it could be argued that she utilizes the human form to atmospheric effect rather than employing it as the centerpiece of her works. A freelance illustrator, Catherine McIntyre holds a Master's Degree in photography. The images featured here are from her online gallery, "Nightmares and Dreams" (the complete gallery can be seen at her personal website, at http://wkweb5.cableinet.co.uk/c.mcintyre/home.html .The accompanying commentary is her own.

HORSES' BONES (date unknown)

The nude is a natural symbol of the laying-bare of innermost feelings, and has been a continuing metaphor in my work. It can radiate well-being, or vulnerability and weakness; it can symbolise humanity's deepest essence, or that of the natural world; it can be idealised, realistic, grotesque, dismembered, impersonal, abstracted. The endless ways of representing the nude all carry with them resonances inevitably associated with the depiction of ourselves at our most unprotected. Images of the nude are impossible to ignore.

TRAPPED (date unknown)

I began at the beginning, in the life studio, which teaches an understanding of form, light, and dimension. An abiding fascination with anatomy, the mechanics and moods of the body, and measurement was born here. A Masters degree in photography began the exploration of a nude at once more, and less, literal than that of the drawing class. The images began to assert themselves, to become ends in themselves; they learned to express very personal philosophies,obsessions, states of mind and emotions.

SONG (date unknown)

The theme of aging is also important in the textural elements of the work; the beautiful effects of weathering and distressing on often very unprepossessing substrates being at once destructive and creative carries a paradox mirrored in the aging of the individual. A second major theme is the difficulties of communication. Any conversation is a microcosm of the dissembling, misunderstanding and pretence of everyday transactions. The space between implication and inference, into which so much of importance seems to disappear, the gap between the projected and the true self, the misapprehensions inevitable when thoughts are translated, more or less efficiently, or not at all, into words - all these are the subject of much of my latest work. The nude has become a symbol of veracity, lack of pretence, honesty - and vulnerability.

SPIDERS (date unknown)

The images work, I hope, on two levels. On the aesthetic level of texture, colour and pattern, the work is often about finding correlations between natural and manufactured objects in decay. The laws of physics act equally upon nature and the work of man; some pictures show nature asserting itself and reducing man's efforts to their original elements, while others have nature under threat from encroaching industrialisation. This latter feeling of weight, crushing, compaction, pinning down and hemming in, isolation and ultimately of threat, became elements of the second, emotional level of the work.

VICTORY (date unknown)

I currently work as a computer-based illustrator and graphic designer. The work presented here is the latest in an ongoing personal project which has been developing for many years, through a variety of media, along several major themes.

NECROMANCER (date unknown)

I work currently on a PowerMac 8600/250 in Photoshop 4.0. Original photographs were taken on a Nikon F401 or a Bronica SQ 6x6 camera. The component parts of the images were scanned in on a UMAX Astra 1200S flatbed scanner or a Dainippon Screen colour drum scanner. Original material includes positive colour film, negative black and white film, drawings, collages or found objects.The nude elements were made in collaboration with Sean Earnshaw, Alistair Carrie and Charles Craig, to whom many thanks!

OTHER ARTISTS:

WIlliam Adolphe Bourguereau

H. R. Giger