Oliver Wasow is an American artist who currently lives in New York. He currently teaches Digital Imaging and Photo Critic at a number of schools including The Bard College and The School of Visual Arts. He uses photography as his medium of art in which he takes photographs of various sceneries and then manipulates them digitally to form a unique, surreal visual landscape. My personal reason for liking his art so much is his ability to blend ordinary images he's taken photos of with images he has created digitally to form an image depicting what seems to be of a fantasy world in a way. This is where his art work really gets interesting. He leaves it up to the observer to interpret and dissect for himself what is happening or what has happened in his images.
Above is one of my favorite art works by him. The picture blends together a fruturistic looking building being built along side an open area of a mountain valley. This goes well with he normal themes for his work because he is incorporating different ideas into a picture he has already taken in order to create a whole knew scene in which the viewer is able to imagine what is going on. One reason why i am so drawn to his art work is because their is so much going on and yet everything kind of flows together some how in unison. If a you scan across the image you will run into so many subtle details such as the snake, the cranes, the fields, and even the tornados in the distance. All these details come together in order to make it a great viewing experience for the viewer. I find it very hard to critique his artwork because everything i think I could say to improve his artwork turns out to be details in which make his artwork so unique and appealing. For instance the way the futuristic city doesn't quite match the back ground. Because of this, it really stands out from the rest of the image bu ti believe this is exactly the look that he was going for. Over all i really enjoy Olivers work and all the small details he includes.
Overall, I find Oliver's work to be both fun and fascinating at the same time. To me, his work is some of the most entertaining pieces I have come across and really admire his attention to detail. It seems the more and more I look at his paintings the more details I find and that enhances the overall narrative that i have in my head. Oliver fully embraces the benefits of using computers to manipulate other artistic mediums in a way that really adds to the images and in ways that could not be accomplished by traditional forms of media. If i could add one piece of constructive criticism i would say to try and adventure a little more into the non-realistic part of his pieces. As much as his art feels surreal everything in his work is possible.
