Artist's Statement


Trained as a painter and printmaker, I searched for more than two decades to find a way of bringing to life the images present in my mind’s eye. Brush on canvas or crayon on stone proved curiously inadequate. With the introduction of the capapbilities of the computer, I found my medium.

Creating images using the computer, much as the painter uses the brush, allows me to represent my conscious and unconscious sense of the world in a way that is individual, playful, serious, irreverent, essential.

What begins a work? There is no telling. A glimpse may create a visual vignette - an imaginary, momentary plot - an interpretation, a vision based upon some experience, or person, or an environment, or some object that interests me. Experience informs my imagination, producing an image colored by my past, my preconceptions, predilections, wishful thinking.

The works created always contain the remembered, the imagined, the dreamed, the metaphorical. Using the digital camera and computer, I have found a way of calling forth images, of telling stories visually in still and final form.

BIOGRAPHY

Donna Goodman currently holds a dual appoinment as both professor of art and professor of education at Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina. She is the Peter D. Hyman Endowed Chair’s Professor of Art. She directs the Art Education Program, teaches courses in art education and in art history in the department of Fine Arts of the School of Arts and Sciences; she also supervises in teacher preparation for art education certification in the School of Education.
Goodman received her PHD from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa in Educational Leadership and Planning with emphasis in Arts Administration. She holds an EdS (Educational Specialist Degree) and an MA in Art Studio with emphasis in printmaking from the University of South Carolina at Columbia, SC, and a BFA from Coker College at Hartsville,SC.
Goodman has been started producing digital images in1993. Since then, her work has been included in over fifty nationally juried exhibitions and five international exhibitions. She travels extensively, focusing on medieval and Baroque art sites - especially in the Umbrian region of Italy.
She is a native of the Pee Dee, her home is Olanta, SC. She taught in the public schools in the Darlington School District for 8 years. She is married to Dewey N. Ervin, retired orthopedist.

TECHNICAL OUTLINE

These works are created on a Macintosh G4 computer and a Macintosh Laptop Powerbook G3. My original digital photographs are fed into the computer using the Kodak D210 and/or the Olympus Digital Camera, D-300 L. Software used for photographic digital manipulation are Photoshop 5.5, Painter 4.0, and Apprentice. The images are printed as Iris Prints or on an Epson Stylus Photo EX Inkjet Printer. Because the inkjet images are not colorfast and have a size limitation of 8”x10”, they are resized (up to 11”x17”) and printed (color copied) on acid free printmaking and watercolor papers of various kinds and specialty papers (for example; rice paper and bark paper) in non-fading inks on a Ricoh Color Laser Copier. Each image is printed in an edition of five with one artist’s proof. The images are framed using archival materials.