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Yolanda Klappert

Artist Statement

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Digital Art

I begin each picture with a blank canvas (or screen). The pictures are not scanned images that are “doctored.” I create individually unique works of art while making intuitive decisions about color, depth, perspective, texture, movement, volume, line and mass. The resulting photographic-like paintings, created and rendered on a computer, are printed on special photographic paper with archival inks. Each picture’s wire frame or shell sub-structure is composed of hundreds of individual polygons. The rendering process of the final image takes many, many hours or even days to complete. The completed pictures are composed of several hundred million pixels in size and are so large that they cannot be seen in their entirety on a computer screen until they are printed. The element of surprise is truly a delight, as I often discover unusual and exciting effects not previously evident on the computer screen.

The Inspiration

1998, while pursuing a doctorate in (which I received in 1999), I created a completely original CD-ROM entitled From Stoneage to Rock. It became my all-consuming passion for the summer. After a performing and recording career as a classical concert pianist for twenty-five years, I was excited to discover I could express complicated and interdisciplinary ideas on a multitude of levels simultaneously. The computer became my keyboard, camera, and paintbrush. Most significantly, I experienced a profound joy in creating “something from nothing” while combining my instincts as a musical and visual artist with the sophistication of “cutting edge” technology.

Since then I have become intensely interested in discovering the point at which an idea becomes an inspiration, an “entity unto itself.”

As a pianist, I worked with someone else’s creation. I viewed the printed page as the composer’s shorthand to his or her thoughts and feelings, comparable to a “figured bass” in Baroque music, which provides numerals below a bass line to indicate the harmonies and melodic movement above. The composer’s intentions (and feelings) can never completely be notated musically. There does not exist a symbology comprehensive enough to do so, nor a page large enough (without being impractical or absurd) to accommodate all the additional markings required to express every nuance of his or her concept and emotion. As a visual artist, I therefore look upon my work as a “re-composition” or a sophisticated and complex improvisation of the nature’s “figured bass.”

One of my favorite composers is Johann Sebastian Bach. He worked with traditional Baroque forms such as the fugue and variation, synthesizing these compositional styles already in use, rather than developing new ones. His genius not only perfected these forms but also transcended them, making each work an innovation of both form and style. The key to his creations was in the simultaneous overlapping of musical ideas, often disparate in rhythm and melody, creating exciting cohesive and beautiful musical gems.

Three modern-ear artists have influenced me and demonstrate an artist expression similar to Bach’s. Each of the artists, Escher, Durer and Van Gogh, worked within the conventions of art – respectively using pen and ink, watercolors and oils – yet each transcend the implied boundaries of their media by creating innovative forms and styles. Escher used perspective to explore and “prove” how two-dimensional relationships can appear as three. Durer, the Renaissance painter and engraver, also had the ability to draw the viewer into the picture and believe in its reality, sensitively using the techniques of perspective, detail, color, and texture to create an overall sense of photographic realism. Van Gogh used color and gesture to enunciate his experiments with spatial relationships and rendered them on a two-dimensional plane.